The Drunken Pirate
My friend Steve writes a blog like I do. In fact, while he has been a writer since long before we knew each other (we met almost exactly twenty years ago), I think my blog prompted him to start his own blog (https://stevelarsen.net/yeah-but-do-you-have-a-finger-from-a-dead-pirate/). Yesterday he wrote a story about the finger of a dead pirate. I won’t ruin the story by summarizing it but will say that it got me thinking about pirates. I am up once again in the middle of the night for some odd purpose and have a clarity of mind that has made me realize that trying to go to sleep again tonight is unlikely to happen. For some reason, the term pirate is sticking in my mind. I have written of drunken sailors (a specific reference to President Trump during the impeachment trial) and I even interchanged pirate and sailor a few times, but a pirate is quite different from a sailor and drunken is a very specific state of being. A pirate is someone who commits robbery on the high seas. As for drunken, Merriam-Webster refers to it as “an abnormal state that is essentially a poisoning”. So, a drunken pirate (please do not think for a moment I would debase my story by any subtle reference to that sexual prank referred to in the Urban Dictionary) is someone poisoned and felonious that casts about at large and ruthlessly does harm for both gain and pleasure. In other words, it is the perfect description of how I see Donald Trump.
When I cannot sleep, I start by wondering why that might be. Have I overindulged my quiescence, or do I have something on my mind? If the later, is it something specific or general, something fixable or inescapable? My kids are all fine. My health shows no signs of malaise. My finances are not in disrepair. My work is pleasantly non-burdening. I have no pending or procrastinated tasks (in fact, I am quite up to date). And then I remember, we are in the midst of a global pandemic and fully 113,000 Americans have died (over 5% of recorded infections), we are struggling as a nation with racial and civil unrest, and the economic horizon (despite the stock markets aberrant wish to look unphased) is quite disrupted for years to come. That should be enough to keep anyone awake at night. But then, I remember that during this time of great upheaval and uncertainty, the nation and the world are being led by a person who will become the most notorious drunken pirate of all time, Donald J. Trump.
I cannot tell whether his intoxication (given that he is not a drinker or a known taker of drugs….other than Hydroxychloroquine…which may or may not have been truly ingested by him given his ongoing challenge with the truth) is the result of dementia, power-mongering or just juvenile preponderance of hormonal excess. His piracy is more easily defined because it can be restricted to direct acts of larceny in terms of emoluments abuse or it can be broadly seen as the evisceration of the American ideals and dignity of mankind or even the importance of common sense and humility. He is drunken beyond description and a pirate without bounds. And yet, he persists tolerably in the eyes of 39% of the nation. Everyone loves a pirate in concept.
I know with certainty in my heart that there will come a time, hopefully sooner rather than later, but eventually without question, when the world (including most of his 39%) will see him in full undress and come to the collective realization of, “what were we thinking?” Humans are filled with seemingly endless ability to rationalize their mistakes, but there have been times when no rationalizations are made because the mistakes are so very unmistakable (is that a tautology or just a necessary reinforcement?) Nobody seriously tries to suggest that Hitler did anything worthwhile or was in the slightest bit well-meaning. Few debate whether Richard Nixon was guilty of abuse of power. Donald Trump’s claims to fame will be that he gamed the system better than anyone ever imagined to run roughshod over the country that was both scared of and angry about the changing state of the world by fooling more of the people more of the time than is wildly imaginable.
There is an argument that favors the value of piracy and the even greater value of drunken piracy. I was watching The Netflix docudrama The Last Czars about the fall of the House of Romanov in 1917. As our history lessons remind us, the final days were overshadowed by the rampaging mysticism of Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, the monk who wheedled his way into the troubled consciousness of Emperor Nicholas II and mostly the Tsarina Alexandra, his forlorn wife and mother to the infirmed hemophiliac son, Alexei. In many ways, it is implied that the aberrant influence of Rasputin over the Czar and the anti-social visage of this sex-addled, self-proclaimed omniscient who declared himself all-knowing was the straw that broke the back of the imperialistic camel of Russian aristocracy. Things had gotten so bad with food shortages and daily street rioting that Nicholas was induced to stand strong and, dare I say it, double-down on his oppressive crowd-control tactics. Historians would say that Nicholas was a weak and impressionable ruler who followed bad advice, but Nicholas was also a vessel for the collective ills of a compendium of uncaring and abusive feelings of the aristocracy towards the masses. Law and order versus the MOB! So sayeth our latest hirsute vessel of divine affliction, The Donald. Every day he clarifies for more and more of his devotees that he is nothing more than a drunken pirate on the prow of the ship of state. He is still commanding with impunity that disloyals walk the plank, but more and more of the real leaders are getting past their fears of reprisal.
Drunken pirates are too unpredictable to be easily dethroned. Their very drunkenness is their best protection since their impunity allows them to stare into the face of reason and spit into its eye. Rasputin does just that when the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church tries to assassinate him. But the beauty of drunken pirates is that they stumble a lot and despite their sea legs, they do themselves in with their own flailing. The even greater beauty is that they are quickly forgotten in policy terms and remembered forever in legend and tall tales of idiocy. I look forward to the legacy of Trump the Terrible.