Trump and Florence Foster Jenkins
Florence Foster Jenkins was a New York socialite and opera singer who was known and mocked for her flamboyant performance and absence of singing ability. She was ranked as “the world’s worst opera singer”. “It was said that she had liberated herself “completely from the shackles of musical notation.” Her perfomances were “never exactly an aesthetic experience, or only to the degree that an early Christian among the lions provided aesthetic experience; it was chiefly immolatory, and Madame Jenkins was always eaten, in the end.”
Ira Siff, dubbed her “the anti-Callas”: said: “Jenkins was exquisitely bad, so bad that it added up to quite a good evening of theater … She would stray from the original music, and do insightful and instinctual things with her voice, but in a terribly distorted way. There was no end to the horribleness. Cole Porter rarely missed a recital, but it is said he had to bang his cane on the floor to keep from laughing. Whether Lady Jenkins was aware of her lack of talent is up for debate, but she became a beloved cult figure because of her authenticity and absoute delight for music.
President Elect has a love for performance and notariety as Lady Jenkins. This week on an appreciation tour we saw him re-enacting his greatest hits for loving audiences who chanted “lock her up.” He sang his disjointed and gloating aria for no other purpose than receiving applause. His lyrics in the style of a Southern Tupac:
We didn’t break it.
We shattered that sucker.
Shattered it, man.
That poor wall is busted up.
So, I’ll never forget it though
because it felt so good.
You know, more so
because they kept saying
there’s no path
and all this nonsense.
It’s one thing to be a syphilis riddled socialite parodying a diva in public. It’s quite another for the President Elect of the United States to become a diva parodying the office of the President on the world stage. And this is especially true because there is no mandate of a popular vote. The bitterness of the Clinton camp lingers and is becoming organized. And the President Elect’s childish refusal of State and Intelligence briefings reveals an unprecedented lack of concern for the future of the US.
This week my phone consistently rang with calls on how to do FOIA requests, how to file lawsuits, how to constitutionally stop the electors from voting for Trump, and how to protect the groups that were attacked in this campaign and even now. There are over 2.5 million people who opppose Trump and see the election as a disgrace.
The incompetence of accepting phone calls and Tweeting about how world leaders are paying homage, led to a rebuke by China. The 10 minute telephone call with Taiwan’s leadership breached the “one China” policy, and China lodged a diplomatic protest. In order to save face, China blamed the event on its scapegoat Taiwan which it considers a rogue province. China has not ruled out bringing Taiwan back into the fold by force. And when criticised about the call, the Tweet excuse was “they called me.” A deflection often employed by young children who don’t want to accept responsibiity for mistakes.
The President Elect lives in an all-enveloping delusion protected and nurtured by an inner circle of kept family and political gadabouts. It occurs as though the President Elect will be staging impulsive stunt shows in which he plays Lady Foster. Now that corporations know that they can extort tax breaks by threatening to move jobs to Mexico, how much corporate welfare policy has been created? Now that you are talking to Pakistan like a high school candidate for prom king, will you destabelize relations with India?
It’s time to stop pushing buttons like a three year old in an elevator – just to see what will happen.
Beth Klein 