The Weekly Screed (#732)

Land of the aggrieved,
home of the whiny
By David Benjamin

“I am the most fabulous whiner. I do whine, because I want to win.”
                                                                      — Donald Trump

MADISON, Wis. — Excuse me for a moment while I compare Donald Trump, red-state narcissist, to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights martyr.

It all starts with Dr. King’s definition of victimhood. In word and deed, Dr. King crystallized the plight of America’s black minority as victims — of oppression, suppression, exclusion, vigilantism, terrorism and apartheid. He lamented that the pathology of victimhood had persisted as the black man’s burden ever since the first slave ship debarked from Africa.

Against this cruel history, Dr. King’s liberating message was, simply, “Enough.” He told black Americans that victims could fight back — without the violence that had been systematically exercised against them.

Dr. King stood his ground, folded his arms, and resisted without retaliation until the brutality of his foes made their bigotry untenable. He turned the historic victimization of the black community into a form of theater that played — dramatically and irresistibly — on the national stage.

It worked. Then it backfired.

After the civil rights movement achieved some of its goals, and ended for all practical purposes with Dr. King’s murder in 1968, a vast white reaction took Dr. King’s lessons to heart and donned the mantle of victimhood.

White folks — really, most Americans — have been pissing and moaning ever since. Victimhood has become the Great American Pose. We are a coast-to-coast huddled mass yearning to bellyache. Richard Nixon, our first victim-president, bitched constantly that the press hated him and the Jews were out to get him. America has marked a half-century of mounting selfishness with periodic festivals of victimhood. We lost a war to a bunch of pajama-clad guerrillas because the hippies protested, our politicians chickened out and our generals were pussies. We got blackmailed by a gang of Arab oil sheiks because Jimmy Carter gave us all a case of malaise.

By the end of the 1970’s, we were tying yellow ribbons around trees because we were held helplessly hostage by a handful of thugs in Iran — a tiny, weak country that we had ruthlessly dominated for 40 years. On September 11, when Al Qaeda murdered thousands of us, we were so accustomed to seeing ourselves as victims that even New Yorkers went soft. We spent a decade wallowing in self-pity while our leaders dicked around in the Middle East. When our victim-in-chief dressed up in a Tom Cruise Top Gun costume and styled himself a “war president,” nobody giggled. We shrugged in resignation when he let the bad guys sneak away, invaded the wrong country and created a whole new generation of victims, GIs and Marines who came home with absent limbs, shattered brains, crushed illusions or just plain dead.

The troops who made it back from the quagmire were survivors — victims. But we called them heroes, because what’s the difference anymore? It wasn’t their valor we valued. It was their pathos. They came home to the same neurosis and backbiting that typifies the 21st-century incarnation of the land of the aggrieved and the home of the whiny.

When a new tormenter, ISIS, beheaded a few Americans, our sense of victimhood blossomed and bled. While groping for someone — anyone, everyone! — to blame for these faraway atrocities, we joined together to sing the chorus composed by Paddy Chayevsky to assuage our national plurality of couch-bound malcontents: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m got going to take this any more.”

In the film Network, after millions march to their windows to spew this cry of invigorating defiance into the airshaft, they go back, sit down and watch TV — waiting for the tube to tell them what to shout next.

Today, the guy on TV telling angry white men what to holler is Donald Trump. In his sympathy for the voiceless, he vaguely resembles Dr. King. He speaks, after all, for the victims of a system that has marginalized them, stolen their opportunities and left them with little to do but wonder what the hell’s going on here. Stand behind me, Trump roars. I have purchased the great, vengeful power that none of you shlemiels can afford. I share your fury. I vow to victimize your victimizers.

But there is a difference. Dr. King, who must have been as mad as hell, never betrayed his anger. Dr. King not only had a voice. He had a plan — a dream, if you will. He said, I will spend my life working to set you free and make you equal. Dr. King’s victories validated his words. Today, we’re still not free and equal, but we’re closer to that dream, thanks to him.

If any plan can be discerned in Trump’s blitzkrieg of blather, it’s payback. Trump is, in his own formulation, the whiner in chief. He’s the voice of ten million  twitchy grumblers who harbor the heartfelt belief that they’re not to blame for all the screw-ups and miseries in their disappointing lives. He assures us that all this crap is somebody else’s fault. Maybe it’s Mexicans? Or the Kenyan usurper.

Consider this outburst: “I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad.”

The rhetoric is Trumpian, but it’s not Trump. Our orator is Howard Beale, Trump’s fictional forebear, a reality-show blowhard in a cynical movie, who had to be killed when his ratings crashed.

By and by, when his whining begins to grate, we’ll do the same to Donald. Figuratively, I presume.