Warped Mom

We sit on the pavement of the Palace Parking Lot.  It’s my third Warped Tour with my daughter, Katya.  This year she has blue hair, a septum piercing, and is wearing a Batman cropped top.  The sun is beginning to go down (thank God!), and we are both exhausted, but we have two hours to go before BearTooth plays.  They are the big band this year.  I don’t own a phone, so it seems only fair that during lulls I should get to pull out my paperback—The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez—if only to feel myself thinking … anything.  Thank God, I am still alive, not brain-dead!  “You’re never gonna get it I’m a hazard to myself,” sang the EMO heartthrob Andy Biersack (a.k.a Black) earlier in the afternoon, “I’ll break it to you easy this is hell, this is hell.”  I sang along loudly, thinking, “yes, Andy, this is hell.”  But I keep this thought to myself because Katya thinks I like this stuff and I try, for her sake, to get into the spirit, singing along to the songs I know, pumping my fist in the air, and bouncing up and down when I feel like it but not when some of the more obnoxious singers (like Fronzilla of Attila) issue commands to the crowd:  “You gotta go fuckin nuts!  I don’t wanna see anyone standing still!”  Make me, asshole … is what I’m thinking.  It’s hard to control my inner critic:  it all seems so sad, all the young people thinking that this is self expression; and directly in front of me is a biggish boy wearing a tee shirt that actually says, “Jesus is a cunt.”  Why am I here?  My short practical answer is that the only year I let her go with Zoey and Zoey’s mother, she passed out from dehydration, lack of food, and exhaustion.  In the months leading up to this year’s festival, I asked many times if friends weren’t going.  “I’d rather go with you, Mom.”  This year I understood why.  

 She needs a maternal buffer to give hugs and love.  She puts her head on my shoulder and I rub her back as we sit inside the cool arena to take a break, watching the artists (so-called) on the floor passing trays along a lavish buffet.  She seems lost and maybe even bored.  I look over the printed schedule to see if anything strikes me:  “hey, what about ‘War on Women,’?”  She’s game and we head out in the heat to a smallish crowd watching a band with two women guitarists and a lead singer with green dreadlocks which she whips in circles as she crouches and leaps around the stage, working the crowd, urging us to say things like, “I was RAPED!  I had an ABORTION!”  I can’t say the words in this context, even if the first phrase is true.  Why am I here?  My longer psychological answer is that I identify with my daughter’s struggles to become her own person not just because I was once an adolescent but because I have, for complex reasons, remained trapped in the role of child daughter.      

“Nearly every major character begins his life as the hero of his own fairy tale; then comes a point at which the world and his desires come into conflict and his eyes are opened both about his own errors and the nature of life.”  Gabriel Josipovici on Old Testament characters.

My mother was and, even at 86, still is an amazing storyteller, and I grew up listening to stories in which she was the champion worker who picked peaches, packed blueberries, milked cows, cultivated fields, faster and more diligently than anyone else.  She and her brother were “hellians,” “the worst kids in Nesco,” tipping over outhouses, jumping off barn roofs with umbrellas, racing Packards.  She went to a one-room schoolhouse, taught by her mother, but when she went to public high school, she was a star basketball player and popular … of course.  When her sister, Ruthellen, came to our house to visit, she and my mother, nicknamed Midge, would make lists, while dragging on Kool cigarettes, of the boys and men they had kissed.  I listened.  I loved her stories … loved the extended family life, lived on the edge of the Pine Barrens in South Jersey, that came vividly to life in her hero stories.  I must have been 9 or 10 when I convinced my younger sister Katie to get Mom to let us go down to Jersey in the summer and pack blueberries for the last of the Wescoat blueberry farmers.  We were the only packers (the pickers were migrant workers).  Aunt Ruth shook us awake before dawn and sent us back out to the barn after dark … it was a grueling schedule for two little girls from suburbia, used to running through sprinklers, riding bikes, and playing with friends every lazy summer day.  We lasted two weeks.  For years I accepted my mother’s take on our failed experience:  kids today just don’t know how to work.  Now I think that my work was just fundamentally different:  I was trying to imagine Midge’s magical life.  Going there was my attempt to get inside it, an effort closer to anthropological fieldwork than actual field work. 

As I grew up, I felt like I grew smaller in relation to my larger-than-life mother.  My father died.  I found him dead in a cabin on an Adirondack Lake.  My mother wasn’t there.  With my siblings, I screamed my grief into the fog on a rainy August morning.  My mother arrived, and pulled us into a group hug; but Mom was too strong to cry.  Not then or anytime afterward did she show any sign of weakness.  We were taught to soldier on.  “Lot’s of families lose fathers.”  I took up a permanent post at her kitchen table to keep her company while she cooked turned French Fries in oil and flipped hamburgers for four kids and two elderly parents.  She needed someone, didn’t she?  She must want to talk.  The hole in her chest must hurt like mine.  But she never spoke of missing him or of her feelings.  She never invited me to speak of mine.  She kept telling stories though, but the stories were no longer about South Jersey.  They were about her move to upstate New York and adjustment to suburban housewifery, and in them, she cast my much loved father as some kind of oppressive force from which she could now return to being superhero, Midge. 

            The way I found to feel, grieve, and recover (to the extent on ever does) was literature.  I stayed in school to complete a Ph.D. and write a dissertation on the female complaint, titled, “Means to Mourn Some Newer Way.”  I taught in Turkey, got a teaching job in Flint, published a book and many articles, married, adopted a baby girl from Kazakhstan, taught in Kazakhstan on a Fulbright.  I have worked hard and made myself some sort of heroine.  But my mother has never read a word of what I’ve written.  “When you go there,” comments my husband, “you lose your personality.”  I shrink into the little girl listening to stories, waiting for an invitation to speak of feelings or ideas. 

“You are safest when you are able to use your feelings on your own behalf,” a wise friend notes, but it has been hard for me to accept that sensitivity, imagination, and a passion for thinking and analyzing can be the very things that make me strong.  My mother still forbids me to drive the 13 hours to her house.  She doesn’t think I’m capable.  She worries if she calls my home in Flint and finds that I’m walking home from the university in the dark—“is it safe?”  To her, I am still very much a child.  It has only been recently, since facing up to my own abuse and taking a stand against my abuser that I’ve distanced myself from her.  When she blamed me for that, something broke inside.  She became less of a hero.

Warped Tour fell at the end of Katya’s two weeks of musical theater camp.  After the festival, she had several dates with friends, and I even let her go to a movie with a boy “friend.”  When I picked her up from Courtland Center cinema, she couldn’t tell me anything about the plot of Dunkirk and smelled strongly of the boy’s cologne.  “I guess it went well,” I said, uncertain what to feel.  That same night she flat out refused to go on the family vacation.  “You didn’t tell me it was for TWO weeks.  I cannot be away for that long.”  “But, I’ve done everything you wanted this summer,” I pleaded weakly, “and I haven’t had a vacation.”  We screamed at each other.  I took the dog out, and came home prepared to read quietly and stick to my guns.  But she wanted to “talk it out,” and lectured me tearfully for an hour and a half … about her struggles, her problems, her fears, her lack of friends.  It went on and on.  Later that night, I decided to skip the New Jersey leg of the vacation even though I had arranged to meet relatives I hadn’t seen in 40 years.  Back in July, I’d written a magazine essay on my mother’s mythologizing of Nesco (the farming settlement where she grew up) that was also an attempt to come to terms with what her place means to me.  It was not easy for me to claim the right to tell the story and parts of it differently than my mother would.  The role reversal felt dangerous almost as if I were striking out against Mom.  This summer trip to Jersey, connected as it was with my personal project, promised to be extra special.  But we always had fun there anyway.  There is the beach, the Atlantic City boardwalk, great seafood, the woods, the ticks, the hotel pool—what’s not to like?—and I couldn’t understand Katya’s preference for her own dark bedroom.  But rather than work on the puzzle, I gave in to her pressure:  cancelled the hotel, cancelled the kennel, and suffered a very angry day … angry at her, at myself, at the world.  When dinnertime rolled around, after I had childishly given her the silent treatment all day, we screamed at each other again. 

I had put off calling my Uncle Bud to say I wasn’t coming.  I just didn’t have the heart.  It was a good thing, too, because my mother called at 7:00 the next morning and told me, in no uncertain terms, that I could not cancel and that I had to take control.  “Mothers are in charge.” 

Two hours later, Katya rolled out of bed and wandered into my office.  I told her quietly that we had to go to New Jersey, that I deserved a vacation, but that we would shorten the trip, giving her two more days in her twilit comfort zone.  She accepted it, and we both were happy that day. 

Was my mother right?  “Always check things out with me,” she’d said.  I was grateful for the advice but not the added commentary on my approach to mothering—“You have let her run you.”  There it was again:  the same old insinuation that I am incompetent.  But I prefer to think (and I told my mother this) that the fights, the arguments, the almost physical struggle is hard but also important.  My daughter is seen and heard, and I hope she is also learning to see and hear me.  We are parts of a whole, and neither can be content if the other is miserable or if the other silently capitulates.  I’ve raised a screamo singer (she literally was the screamer for a short-lived teen band), and that, to me, is far preferable than a daughter fearful of her own voice and her own aggression.

 

            The night before Warped Tour, I sat in Churchill’s drinking with two former students, and we talked about family and how we are never “done” struggling with our mothers and fathers.  I’d just finished Joyce Carol Oates’ remarkable essay, Boxing, and it struck me that family is the first arena in which we must fight for our lives.  Oates thinks that America’s obsession with sports is “the dark, denied, muted, eclipsed, and wholly unarticulated underside of America’s religion of success.”  This is because sports, especially boxing, is only partly about winning; it is also about losing.  “Failure, hurt, ignominy, disgrace, physical injury, sometimes even death—these are facts of life, perhaps the very bedrock of lives.”  My mother tried to deny the facts of life.  She didn’t let me fight openly, and so I’ve had shadow box.  In any boxing match, if one cannot hit, one can yet be hit and know that he is still alive.  After taking many many hits, I am coming to believe that I am not a human punching bag but have been cultivating pain in the interests of a project that is forming and growing within.  Whether my own mother approves, I know I am a fighter temperamentally, a thinker by trade, and a Warped mother with fists pumping the air.

Turtle and Teen

            I’d moved out to the screened in porch to read in my circle of light.  Out she comes.  “Mom,” she says, testing the waters, I forgot to show you a picture I took this afternoon.  Reluctantly, I’d let her go to For-Mar (a local arboretum) to meet a bi-polar friend with whom she’s enamored and who is the subject of her book on friendship and “mental disorders” because “that’s what teens are interested in.”  She brings up the photo on her phone and hands it to me.  A snapping turtle hovers close to the surface of the pond surrounded by orange “goldfish,” but the reflections of clouds on the water make it seem like the pond is the heavens and he’s swimming both in and out of his element at the same time.  “Oh, it’s a lovely picture,” I tell her, keeping aloof, keeping up my silent treatment.

            “We had an agreement,” I said in my first message, “4:00.”  She isn’t answering her phone, and I call again, having borrowed a phone from one of the student workers in the Nature Center.  “I’m torn between worry and anger, but you better get your butt up here fast.”  She tells me a lot, so I know the weirdness of this boy, I know he likes her, I know he smokes pot, and I know he has been picked up by the police for wandering around after curfew going through dumpsters.  Crazy images pass through my mind, but mainly I am angry.  Breathless and with soaking wet feet, she’s back at the car forty minutes late without the boy, who slunk away, afraid to meet a mother.

            I listen to her excuses, speak in brief, angry sentences, but there are things she says that move me.  She explains that she told Ryan two days ago that this wasn’t a date.  She reads me a text.  “Look, I need to take it slow.  There are four guys trying to get with me right now, and I am evaluating each one very carefully and trying not to make the same mistakes I’ve made before, getting into ‘friends with benefits’ too soon.”  OMG these are my words of advice differently worded.  I smile inwardly thinking that maybe she listens, that maybe my efforts to guide her are not for naught.

            I talk about boundaries.  I talk about agreements.  I talk about respect.  What I can’t bear to talk about was the “date” itself.  “He was nice to hang out with,” she says, placing sweetness like a life-saver inside the bitterness of an argument I was driving.  Later on, I get more details as she tries to explain how a heavy conversation made them “lose track of time.”  “Well, we walked back to the hill where you like to go and sat down under a tree.”  I know that old tree.  I touch it when I’m weak.  I pray in its direction.  It is an orienting pole—an axis mundi.  And although I am conscious of a big emptiness … so little time for pleasure in my life and no one to walk and talk with in that intense teen-age kind of way, I admire my daughter’s choice of spot.  I don’t tell her but it feels nice to recognize her shared desire for closeness—not just to a boy but to nature.  I thought that I’d failed to instill that, but it must be there inside of her, and it came out of hiding when I least expected it.  Like the turtle … I’m trying to let her go, let her swim in her element, and find, to my delight that she’s also swimming in mine. 

            Ryan was almost an hour late for their meeting.  “Mom, I almost called you to come get me, but I figured I’d walk down to the pond to look for the snapping turtles.  I got into watching them and talking to the people on the dock.”  Before I adopted Katya, I would walk in For-Mar every day.  As long as I could, I carried her in a backpack and fed her baby food in the parking lot.  Once she was a toddler, I tried to get her to go with me:  “let’s go visit the snapping turtles.”  I used them as bait.  Seeing them was always surprising—even though it became a regular event.  How could they sense the presence of humans, and why did they surface and move close?  Was it expectation of food—we obeyed the sign “do not feed the animals”—or some other mysterious impulse?

            Because of our history with these turtles, Katya’s photo means way more to me than I let on.  That old turtle up from the bottom of the pond connects mother and daughter and helpfully carries the wonder of childhood into the emotional tumult of teenage experiences.  But it also reminds me that while it may be in the nature of all creatures to leave the mother, there exists an impulse toward connectivity that is just as strong.  In this mini crisis, I rejected Katya, but she kept lifting her head above the water and using her flipper fins to push aside the clouds.  I wonder why it is so easy to transpose a line from its romantic context in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream to this situation where it perfectly describes old and new love I feel for her:  “I have found my daughter like a jewel, my own and not my own.”    

Shakespeare on Pussy-Grabbing Politics

            My scriptwriting class, Shakespeare in Performance, began in early January 2017.  The objective of the class was to write four one-act plays that use Shakespeare to explore the politics of modern relationships through the question, “what do we fight for?”  In the weeks leading up to the inauguration of Donald Trump—a day many students skipped class and stayed home—we were deep into our first play, which happened to be Richard III.  The famously deformed, Richard, seeks the crown to find acceptance and love which his mother has not provided and which he despairs of finding in a lady’s lap:  “Since I cannot prove a lover … I am determined to prove a villain.”  He smiles (and murders) his way into power, driving his brother Edward, the king, to an early grave, drowning brother Clarence in a butt of wine, and ordering the assassination of his two young nephews.  Richard is a sociopath, who describes himself as a Machiavel and consummate actor.  But as he rises to power, is crowned and quickly implodes, a veritable chorus of women—putative losers watching from the margins—jeer at and insult him.  “Thou lump of foul deformity!,” “Abortive rooting hog!,” “Poisonous, bunch-backed toad!,” they yell.  While the women have no political power, their speech undermines Richard’s confident self-fashioning with metaphors that capture the truth of his deformed body and soul. 

            Shakespeare uses Richard’s war with women to give psychological depth to his political rise.  He blames his deformities on his mother and makes a bid for the crown, presumably to sublimate an erotic drive he expects will never be satisfied.  But in the second scene of the play—as if to test his seductive power, he woos and wins Lady Anne (whose husband Richard killed in battle).  He doesn’t love her and doesn’t intend to keep her; he goes after her, it seems, to showcase his powers of seduction:  if he can win her, “all the world to nothing.”  He knows women are his chief enemy, and though he seems to defeat them, Shakespeare shows that it is women (not any highly placed politicos) who bring Richard down.  The truths they speak when they have nothing left to lose finally cause him to crack. 

            The parallels between American politics and the play were obvious enough to beg comment:  Trump defeated Hillary (painted as some kind of crone) despite (or because of) his outrageous bragging about grabbing pussy and the small regiment of women who came forward to accuse him of verbal violence, harassment, and even rape.  Women retaliated and came out in record numbers for the Women’s March on Washington two days after small crowds watched Trump take the oath of office—“on a Bible,” one of my students sneered.  The new president needed to exaggerate the size of the inauguration crowd and diminish the crowds of women, but everyone could see that he was rattled.  There were so many comparisons to be made between Richard and Trump but the most obvious one was their war with women.  However, as soon as I gestured carefully to the elephant in the classroom, I kicked off a quiet war with a right-wing male student that ended with a three-page attack email, accusing me of being a liberal college professor and feminist.

            Similar dynamic on a much larger scale:  Delta Airlines and Bank of America withdrew their sponsorship of the Public Theater just weeks ago (July 2017) because a Trump-esque Julius Caesar—with shock of hair, overlong red tie, and Slovenian accented wife—in the free Central Park production caused offense.  But “Trump is way too dumb to be a credible real-world analogue” for any of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, writes Grace Tiffany (fiction writer and English professor at Western Michigan).  “Despite their huge flaws, Shakespeare’s heroes are highly intelligent, well-versed in their countries’ histories, and, at least in the long run, painfully and astutely self-reflective and morally aware.  They have the capacity to learn”  (shakespearefiction.blogspot.com).  To find a Shakespearean personage who resembles Trump, Tiffany turns from tragedy to comedy and scans a list of buffoons to settle on Jack Cade—a clown in the Henry VI subplot who is also dangerous.”  Although I’m sure literary critics and political commentators have done it for generations, I question the usefulness of matching modern political leaders with Shakespearean characters.  I remember the first time I heard this done.  It was in the run-up to the Iraq War: I was watching Chris Matthews’ talk show, Hardball, and heard him compare Bush Junior to Henry V.  I laughed aloud at the mismatch:  W can’t even properly pronounce “nuclear,” how is he comparable to the fictional leader who gives the greatest ever motivational speech—“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”  Clearly, Shakespeare was being used to somehow knight or right the figurehead of the neo-con hawks.  

            We seem to lean on Shakespeare in troubled political times when we know we need help thinking about messy political situations, and this has never been more true than at this moment in time when the news outlets are waging a sectarian war, and the public needs more thinking and less shouting, but it is questionable whether analogue hunting, exchanging toga for a red tie, or even making blatantly political remarks in class is helpful.  Censorship forced Shakespeare to think and write subtly and deeply, and perhaps we must follow his lead.  There’s no doubt that intellectual freedom is being compromised by the caricature of the liberal college professor, but my comment lost me the opportunity to explore the relation between misogyny and sham politics that Richard III invites, which could have helped students understand how to read Trump’s war with women, which, judging by the latest skirmish with morning news anchor, Mika Brzezinski, shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

            I see now, with the benefit of hindsight, that what merited exploration is the similar placement of Richard’s seduction of Lady Anne and Trump’s brag about “grab[bing]” women “by the pussy” at the beginning of both character’s and candidate’s political wins.  Is misogyny a harbinger of political seduction?  If politicians are permitted to “do anything” to women (as Trump claimed he could), does that mean that they will be able to grab the body politic by the pussy as well?  So it seems.  The value of Shakespeare in general and Richard III in particular is that we get to train our analytical eyes on minds on a case study:  if we read the playbook of operators like Richard and Trump, perhaps we will be less vulnerable to being taken in by them.  Let’s take a look.

            Before we get to the main issue—politics as seduction, it is worth noting a powerful stylistic similarity between Richard and Trump.  Richard is always speaking directly to the audience, confiding his nefarious schemes and making us complicitous.  Trump’s incessant tweeting works in a similar way.  They are midnight confidences, shared off hours and offhand—the Public Theater had him tweeting in a golden bathtub—but we participate in their vitality by listening, reacting, re-tweeting, and endlessly rehashing them.  I think we have minimized the power of these tweets.  We shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that these tweets are irrelevant; they are slyly seductive, and America is hooked on them.  We need to turn him off and demand official press conferences which would, hopefully, raise the level of public discourse in America.

            Shifting back to blatant seduction, let’s see how Shakespeare’s Richard does it.  Before coming onto Lady Anne, he tells the audience exactly what he’s up to: it’s almost like he sets up the blazing hoop so we can marvel as he effortlessly jumps through.  “What though I killed her husband and her father?  The readiest way to make the wench amends is to become her husband and her father.”  Watch me, he directs: we do.  He does it, and then he gloats:  “Was ever woman in this humor woo’d?  Was ever woman in this humor won?  I’ll have her but I will not keep her long.”  How does he do it?  Well, it’s a long scene of verbal dueling with much graceful cut and thrust, and Lady Anne is sharp-witted and disarmed with some difficulty.  Basically, Richard turns her into a pussy and grabs her.  She begins as a proper Lancastrian noblewoman, following the dead King Henry’s hearse.  He was her father-in-law; she was married to his son, Prince Edward.  Richard is her arch-enemy, and she has every reason to want revenge.  When he appears, she calls him all kinds of names, spits at him, returns his parries of wit with sarcasm and mockery.  She doesn’t budge … until he makes a lewd remark, suggesting that he will not rest until he does so in her bed.  He hints that she has or is a pussy.  Then, he grabs her:  her beauty was the cause that made him kill her kinsmen, beauty that haunted him in his sleep and made him undertake the death of all the world.  He’s shed tears, despairing to possess her.  Finally, he gives her his sword, and tells her to kill him or accept him as her lover.  Very brilliantly he gives her power—sexual power—over him, and she caves … turns into a pussy before our eyes … not overtly sexual but pious, believing that somehow she has or will have the ability to convert him.  She accepts his ring and agrees to meet him later.  “Hah!, exclaims Richard to the audience and proceeds to assess her weakness and his strength.

                        What?  I, that kill’d her husband and his father,

                        To take her in her heart’s extremest hate,

                        With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,

                        The bleeding witness of my hatred by,

                        Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,

                        And I no friends to back my suit at all

                        But the plain devil and dissembling looks?

                        And yet to win her!  All the world to nothing.

Richard has two targets:  Anne and the audience.  He’s won her, and he’s working hard to win us.  Shakespeare connects the dots and suggests that because politics is seduction, sex scandals don’t hurt and may even help.  We may be shocked by Anne’s capitulation, but we are even more taken with Richard’s charisma or whatever it was and is that let’s Richard and guys like him get away with vulgarity and misogyny.  Trump knows that sex sells.  He said in the 1990s that it did not matter what the media said about him “as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass,” and his attitude did not change during his bid for the Oval Office.  There was the attack on Fox News anchor, Megyn Kelly, who grilled him over previous accusations of sexism.  Trump called her a “bimbo” who was incapable of objectivity when there was “blood coming out of her whatever.”  Just weeks before the election, an audio tape was leaked in which Trump bragged about not only kissing women but grabbing them by the pussy.  Several brave women came forward with accusations of harassment and abuse by Trump, and he was still elected.  “All the world to nothing” indeed!  America was and is as fascinated with the vulgar Trump as the audience is with Richard.  But in Shakespeare’s play, the honeymoon doesn’t last, the audience wakes up, puts on their critical spectacles, and begins to side with vocal women against Trump (oh, I mean Richard).

            Within the very first act, Shakespeare puts the breaks on Richard’s momentum by giving him a worthy female opponent in the woman who was once a queen and army general and is now a powerful crone figure:  Margaret.  Hillary could play her role.  Margaret was exiled after the Lancasters were defeated in the War of the Roses, but instead of disappearing, she sticks around to say everything others are too scared or too self-interested to say to Richard.  She curses Richard and everyone who colludes with him, and her curses come true, forcing the admission that “Margaret was a prophetess.” A woman who has nothing to lose takes a stand.  By the end of Act 1, a commoner—one of the thugs Richard has hired to kill his brother—has a qualm of conscience.  Although he really needs the money, he realizes that he must answer to a higher god than Richard.  Although the other hired gun kills Clarence, he really dies as a result of his own gullibility.  He wanted to believe that Richard loved him, despite so much evidence to the contrary, including a bone-chilling nightmare in which Richard pushed him off a ship to drown.  The message is clear:  don’t be fooled by surface charm, listen to your heart, wake up, do what is right.  Later in the play, citizens talk to one another.  They know the score, but they dare not speak too publicly.  But nobles begin to turn against Richard, and Margaret talks to the surviving women, including Richard’s mother, and teaches them how to curse.  They confront Richard, smother him with the breath of bitter words; and in the day of battle, their words do, in fact, weigh heavier on him that his armor.  He dies fighting on foot; even his horse famously abandons him.

            We rarely think about the relationship between love and politics, but I think only love will motivate masses of people to be engaged citizens.  Remember the Bernie movement?  But what kind of love is needed?  That is the question.  Love of country?  Love of her laws and institutions?  Love of her peoples’ histories and struggles?  Love of a father figure—a king or dictator?  Love of self?  In Richard III Shakespeare gives us a study of a politician wearing the mask of smooth seducer which covers self-loathing; and in Trump we have a crude seducer who loves only himself.  Just think about that fake Time Magazine cover with the flattering headlines that Trump plastered all over his properties.  Cult of personality isn’t just for North Korea or Turkmenistan.  But what will wake up America?  We have no popular theater as they did in Elizabethan England.  We have no common culture that encourages individual critical thinking as did Reformation England.  We are in the middle of an ideological war zone, and we need art desperately because reporting alone will not enable the psychological examination of the president and the electorate that badly needs doing.  When America elected a self-confessed pussy-grabber they were asking to be fucked by Trump, and until that happens—until Trump voters with existing conditions die because Trump Care won’t cover them or until their sons and daughters have to go to war with Iran or North Korea—I think they’ll continue to let Sean Hannity and all the right-wing pundits stroke their persecuted egos and dismiss the very bad deal Trump made with the Russians.  What I’d like to say to all those “poorly educated” rubes is this:  he doesn’t love you, he doesn’t care about you, he used you.  Doesn’t that make you the biggest pussy of all?