As my son could no doubt tell you, I have a bad habit of leaving journals and magazine unread and wrapped up in their plastic for months…well, years… but with the US election bearing down on us next week, I thought that I’d better read Don Watson’s most recent Quarterly Essay before it was completely out of date.
Don Watson has been writing about America for some time, and he wrote his Quarterly Essay 63 ‘The Enemy Within’ in 2016, deploring the prospect of a Trump victory the first time around. In fact, how ironic that Trump is using the phrase ‘The Enemy Within’ during this campaign to describe the people he will target after becoming president.
In this most recent Quarterly Essay he adopts a similar methodology to the one he used in his earlier essay, and in his book American Journeys where he travels to American cities to talk with voters of both Republican and Democratic persuasions. In Enemy Within he focussed on Wisconsin, and in this most recent iteration he focusses on Detroit and Kalamazoo. The essay is dated 23 August, and the narrative moves as events unfold, including the assassination attempt and Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the candidacy, opening the way for Kamala Harris. Just as in his earlier essay, he has nothing but contempt for Trump, but recognizes that people’s motivations for supporting him have to be at least acknowledged.
Could there possibly be anything left to say about Trump? Probably not, at this stage of the game although events continue to highlight some of the points that he makes in this essay, most of which have been also made by other people. Most particularly, he talks about Trump’s connection with wrestling:
Trump has turned Republican politics, and therefore much of American politics, into the wildly adversarial and addictive world of TV wrestling, an entertainment he used to make money and forge his public persona…TV wrestling involves a lot of boasting, posturing and abusing, as well as body slamming. The wrestlers are real, but not real…. Fans enter the world of TV wrestling as they enter any other fiction, knowing it’s make-believe but open to its seduction. They boo and hiss and shout, much as kids used to at Punch and Judy shows, much as we all do during elections. By making politics like TV wrestling, Trump created a fictional setting for his fictions. He can be as abusive and as untruthful as he likes. In a fictional world, to lie and keep on lying is a requirement…You can sound demented, might even be demented; the more demented you are the more you blend with the environment. (p. 4)
When I saw Trump at Madison Square, with the audience brandishing their signs behind him on cue, it certainly evoked a wrestling match. Not just the presence of Hulk Hogan on stage with him, but also the booing and braying of an audience looking for goodies and baddies and enjoying the ‘show’. Don Watson is not the only person to note the Trump/wrestling connection, but it certainly sprang to mind after reading his essay so recently.
It’s rather discouraging to think that by the time the next Quarterly Essay hits the shelves, with the correspondence responding to this essay, we’ll know the outcome. For better or worse.
Rating: 7/10 (I’ve read it all before….)
Sourced from: own copy from subscription
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 