to men who can't say sorry
"the destroyer of worlds"
"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form, and says, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
I suppose we all thought that—one way or another. "
— Julius Robert Oppenheimer
When asked to clarify comments made in passing about ending the Russo-Ukrainian war, President Donald Trump flicked through a scant rolodex of expressions, his face pretzeled into a wry smile before he admitted he didn’t think anything he could do would get him into heaven.
Whether the confessional booth of Air Force One was loosening Trump’s tongue; or his health was humbling him, or the contracting walls—papier-mâchéd with Epstein files—were weighing on him, or the chummy correspondence with a Fox News journalist was placating him; the conditions aligned in syzygy to reveal a candid moment from the grifter-in-chief who once boasted that his supporters were so gullible loyal that they’d vote for him even if he committed murder in broad daylight.
“I’m not heaven-bound…”
Strained chuckles pierce the star-spangled veil and glimpses of a damned soul peek through the waving slits. Behold the laughter of a man wrestling with the mounting entropy of his own sins. If you squint, his admission almost appears like a camel’s hide bunching against slim metal as it tries to squeeze through a needle’s eye.
“I may be in heaven right now as we fly on Air Force One…”
And just like that; the sad clown snaps back into the safety of his gilded caricature. His flirtation with contrition fizzes with static before switching to his regularly scheduled programming of yankee-doodle mammonism.
It has been said before but it bears saying again: Donald Trump is the perfect avatar for America.
To get why, we must first understand World War II as a modern creation myth; a neatly packaged hero’s journey where the righteous allies took down the tyrannical axis powers. After this uncomplicated clash of good vs. evil, America spent its post-war victory LARPING as the valiant tippers-of-the-scales against the Nazis while demonising their temporary allies, The Soviet Union, who were actually responsible for the military defeat of Adolf Hitler. The United States imagined itself as the world’s moral paragon and laundered that fantasy to every corner of the planet.1
To paraphrase John Cena’s character in The Suicide Squad: America believes in peace—no matter how many men, women, and children it needs to kill to get it.
In a way, one could say that Europe entered a blood-pact with America, to absorb the traditional brutality of colonialism and modernise it in exchange for the West’s complicity. A legacy of invasions and coup d’états have been draped in a sheer gown of boot-strapping patriotism, first-strike self-defence, heroic exceptionalism and, of course, the blissful spread of democracy. It was a négligé that softened the blow of dropped nuclear bombs, cluster bombs, drone-bombs, etc. But with the Trump Administration, the pretense has been deemed too pointless to uphold, the clothing too tedious to wear.
We are witnessing a doing-away with the mask and the revelation of the face. Those of us who live in the “margins” — the poor, the racialised, the feminine, the queer, the disabled and the foreign — have always been privy of the true face, always aware of its vulgarity and barbaric potential, always careful to pirouette around its blemishes. It’s a sentiment that gets emptier the more you point it out.
Trump is not the inventor of America’s sins but his tenure as President reflects them. His success is not owed to any traditional or easily observable metric of skill but to an internal radar maladjusted to exploit all things for personal gain. The many republican men and women who once opposed him have since performed harakiris on their own integrity, humiliating themselves to stay tucked in his good graces. He doesn’t rule them with fear—at least, not the primal sense that comes from brushing paths with an apex predator in the wild. He is not scary in that way. His sycophants dread the uncertainty of not being useful to a man whose petulance has so much sway.
Trump is a man governed by the knowledge that winning isn’t a single event, or even multiple events. It is about flooring it towards the unruly crowd that stands between you and what you want, and having the grit to keep driving when your windscreen suffuses with blood and bodies crunch underneath your tires.
Donald Trump is the pseudo-secular delusion of American exceptionalism incarnate. Bending reality to his will but never slowing to question whether his will is worth bending reality to, or stopping to look at the grotesque shapes he’s warped.
To see him show concern for the destination of his immortal soul, however slight or fleeting, is enough to make you question the nature of remorse itself. Because all throughout history, we have tried—as I have done for the last few ranting paragraphs—to comprehend the psyches of men who’ve dedicated themselves to trafficking hate. What motivates them? How aware are they of the terrorism they incite? Are they completely barren of empathy? How do they stomach the evil shit they say and do without wanting to blow their own brains out? Are they even sorry?
“It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime… I was wrong to follow the meanness of Conservatism. I should have been trying to help people instead of taking advantage of them. I don’t hate anyone anymore. For the first time in my life I don’t hate somebody.” — Lee Atwater, advisor to Ronald Reagan, infamous for the 1981 “Southern Strategy” audio leak, re-evaluates his life for Life Magazine after being diagnosed with a brain tumour in 1991.
After being one of the chief midwives that helped unleash President Ronald Reagan onto the world, Lee Atwater converted to Catholicism at his 11th hour and, with his dying breath, disavowed the right-wing ideologies that had brought him a long and storied career.
His renunciation was as heartfelt as it was hollow. With the personal hate in his heart washed clean by his family priest’s sacrament of penance, he passed the onus of cultural repair onto the next generation of politicians.
“I don’t know who will lead us through the ‘90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.”
In 2002, when Margaret Thatcher was asked what her greatest achievement was, she said Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds. Ever the transatlantic mirror, it isn’t hard to see that Reagan’s most notable legacy is the modern Democratic party—their rightward shift towards “The Third Way” under Clinton has meant the same “meanness” Atwater rebuked in death has been dominating America’s politics for nearly 50 years, passing right-wing “toughness” across the aisle, to and fro, in a nightmare blunt rotation.
Atwater hoped his hail mary request for a benevolent leader could remedy the poison he so strategically helped pump into the country. He died before he could see how his contributions to America’s moral decay outlasted him. Wrongdoing was admitted but his admission also laid bare what so many generations before and since have practiced in their exploitation—racial, political, environmental or otherwise—for financial gain.
I will personally benefit from the chaos I write and let my descendants pick up the pieces.
But you can’t encourage decay to fester, spritz a papistic disinfectant on it then backflip off this mortal coil and expect others to pick up the pieces. You have to be responsible for whatever you bring into the world.
After the death of his brother Ludvig, it is said that several newspapers published obituaries of Alfred Nobel in error. As the father of dynamite, it goes that a French newspaper was polemical about Nobel’s hand in inventing military explosives. Le marchand de la mort est mort (the merchant of death is dead), the obituary supposedly wrote. Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday. Horrified that this may be how he’d be remembered, Nobel decided he needed to leave a better legacy after his death. It is thought that this is what drove him to posthumously donate his wealth to founding the Nobel Prize.
“In 1875 he created blasting gelatin, a colloidal suspension of nitrocellulose in glycerin, and in 1887 ballistite, a nearly smokeless powder especially suitable for propelling military projectiles. Nobel, the man who had tried to make handling explosives safe for workmen, was deeply troubled by the destructiveness of his inventions and became concerned with establishing worldwide peace.”
The more earthly-educated among us might point to how his initial efforts should’ve concerned him as much as the military applications. After all, the modern disregard for the environment can be traced back directly to Nobel’s first dynamite stick, gummed against the side of an English quarry to demonstrate how minerals can be extracted quicker.
Nobel didn’t just bring into being the incendiary progenitor of the bomb, inspiring the bloodlust of warmongers for less than a century before reaching the pinnacle of apocalyptic destruction in the form of the nuclear warhead. Intended as a more efficient alternative to the deflagration of black powder, Nobel’s chemical explosives were a cultural accelerant for capitalist expansion, alerting the insatiable appetite of the free market to more violent and instant methods of resource extraction in the cancerous pursuit of financial gain.
Peruse the list of Nobel Peace Prize winners and you cannot help but notice the disparities between the recipients of the Global South (overwhelmingly individuals) and the recipients of the West (largely institutions).
Implicit in this divide is the idea that the problems in nonwestern countries are intrinsically problematic, while western countries seem to only be concerned with beauty-pageant issues like world hunger. These faceless institutions deal with abstract, global problems that western nations are typically responsible for.
This year, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to María Corina Machado: “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” (There’s that “blissful spread of democracy” mentioned about earlier.)
In her recent visit to The White House, she presented her award to Donald Trump—days after he’d illegally abducted President Nicolás Maduro, openly expressed wanting to send American corporations into Venezuela to extract its oil and drone-bombed boats off the country’s coast under suspicion of drug-trafficking.
When you consider the alleged story of Alfred Nobel’s almost-obituary, The Nobel Peace Prize being a means to rehabilitate a shameful legacy explains why and how colonial paradigms run through the award itself. In an endeavour borne of shame, its founder looked to distract the world from the fire and brimstone he’d brought into it by offering a yearly ceremony of paternalistic back-patting. The intention was to manipulate the public’s perception of him; the consequence was that it has provided an institution with principles superficial enough for colonial-capitalists to launder their exploits through. It is how one Peace Prize winner can be responsible for bombing another. It is why racists can win them. It is why Henry Kissinger has one.
Where Atwater could only muster an admission of guilt in a magazine interview, Nobel, at least, pledged his wealth and instruction towards righting his wrongs. What does it mean that both men found clarity about their harm towards their death? Or found their demise the most fitting time to address said harm? One might say it speaks to how big their remorse was—big enough that their cowardice reflected it in size.
Like the moral decay at the heart of all this, the question festers: how do men like Trump, Atwater, Nobel—who live Big Lives with the will to rearrange The Way Things Are on scales so monumental that only seem to arc towards harm; their decisions echoing forward from history towards a yawning apocalypse—even begin to make up for the things they usher into the world?
Are they not driven by something urgent—sometimes well-meaning, sometimes self-serving—that, if they had a conscience, would’ve set them on a path of restoration and self-reflection long before they approached the ass-end of their lives? Instead, Nobel entrusts the establishment of peace congresses to the executors of his will. Atwater “takesies-backsies” on his death-bed. Trump chuckles at own his eternal damnation.
We live in the wake of many aftermaths. Decisions are imposed on us and sold as “tough choices”, harm topples into more harm, hate spreads rhizomatically. Those of use with littler lives—who do not become inadvertent merchants of death with our scientific discoveries, or haven’t helped usher in an endless night of morally-dissonant politics, or reinvigorated settler-colonial violence in the form of a modern lynch-mob—we are making mistakes that are far easier to try and fix.
Jimmy Carter deeply regretted how he handled Israel as president and spent his post-presidency advocating for Palestinian freedom. He is the only president to name Israel’s apartheid plainly. Most of us don’t have to herd global calamities back into Pandora box.
It is okay to admit that you were wrong—today. That you were duped or lead astray. That you let yourself be led by the cruelest part of you and got stuck in a ditch of hate and shame. That you were mistaking stubbornness for for bravery. If you’ve been a public figure cheerleading cruelty for the short-term validation of being on the winning side, don’t be surprised if your backpedaling is met with disgust, distrust and rage. History should treat you as flippantly as you’ve treat your own responsibility to your fellow man. But if you are just a person who’s been swept up in the bonfire of other people’s bigotry, you can break away, today. You can seek forgiveness and try to rectify your mistakes, today. And if that is impossible, you can begin the process of growing past it, today. You don’t have to be like the men with Big Lives who refuse to see the error of their ways. You don’t have to wait until you’re dying to see. You can still turn it around and make a change. But you have to look now.
This was so dope. The end about forgiveness is critical, but also contingent. If there are MAGA supporters who are disgusted with this and finally see their rotten ideology for what it is and have a change of heart, then they deserve the grace to be allowed to change. And that doesn’t mean the even have to be a committed progressive or socialist—just get back to being team human.
But I am wary of the ones who voted Trump because they thought they’d financially gain from his agenda, and are only changing course because their 401(k)s took a hit or they realized that he is an idiotic steward of the economy. It suggests to me that they would co-sign another fascist presidency, provided they were competent enough to not fuck with the money.
https://thatguyfromtheinternet.substack.com/p/empathy-vs-respect
This hit the nail on the head so many times that this could be considered a surgery of multiple lobotomies, but one that brightens your mind instead of crippling you.
On the other hand, I've been debating using cute dividers because I'm afraid that it will seem tone-deaf or clash with the serious matters I sometimes talk about in my essays. But the cute hearts you added here changed my mind. If YOU can break down the biases of colonialism of the most important events from history, how the leaders of that crushed to the ground and repented, and how relevant all of that is in today's world without ruining the tone of the content with red hearts, so can I.