Inauguration Day
The Russian Connection is there, but it’s Chekov’s Man in a Case
On Wednesday morning, as I watched the inauguration of President Biden, I reflected on the long dark night of the soul America has endured over the past few years. My thoughts went to Dr. Joseph Henderson, Jung’s protege who wrote the first section of “Man and His Symbols.”
He showed me how the psyche moves like the pattern known as the Greek Key. The pattern shows the movement is forward, then backward, but not all the way back, and then forward again. It’s as with sewing, the seam holds because of the stitch.
Never has there been so stark a contrast between the progressive, forward movement of energy and the regressive cycle as when we transitioned from Barack Obama to Donald Trump.
We moved away a multi-cultural society symbolized by President Obama, half Kenyan and half Irish, influenced by Asian culture and Kansas culture, into a dystopian autocracy overnight.
We whipsawed into Donald Trump, a misogynist racist narcissist trust fund baby who calmed the white man’s fears of having to work under a woman, their having already endured the black Irishman. He addressed the crowds who gathered in the corn thusly: “In just seven days, I can make you a man.” It was a weird combination of Genesis and Rocky Horror, fundamentalists and reality television. It was right out of the Putin playbook.
It was breathtaking to see the depth of the corruption that rose to power over honesty, dignity and truth. The devil was on top of the Sangre de Cristo, selling valley real estate. There was no lack of covetous rubes lined up to sell their souls for a mess of pottage.
And today we have started back the other direction, faced into the future instead of into a past invented by a guy who sells mirages as desert real estate. “It has nowhere to go but up.” That certainly appealed to evangelicals.
I felt a lot of tension leaving my body. I recalled the morning when I made it back to the Hopi Cultural Center at Second Mesa after flying with a Yavapai Apache pilot who was chasing coyotes away from a hobbled horse with the Cessna. Like Graham Greene playing Russian roulette to cure his depression, I felt renewed to know the chamber wasn’t loaded, even if the pilot was.
Minimus Caesar vanished in a puff of rancid swamp gas and his hypnotized worshippers blinked like owls when the light fell across the Shire again. I imagined spontaneous celebrations in towns across the land, people dancing about and singing, “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead,” as Trump departed the capital grounds.
Then there came to mind a story from Chekov, about “The Man in a Case.” The man who wore his overcoat even when the weather was warm, who had a little case for everything from his watch to his pen knife.
In short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him galoshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life.
The man is described as a Greek master, and he is continually concerned about any freedom or permission others might enjoy, as, “It might lead to something.” He has a constant oppressive effect on the entire town.
Our ladies did not get up private theatricals on Saturdays for fear he should hear of it, and the clergy dared not eat meat or play cards in his presence. Under the influence of people like Byelikov, we have got into the way of being afraid of everything in our town for the last ten or fifteen years.
While there was enough decorum among the people to not declare a holiday when the man died, it was nonetheless a great weight lifted from them, collectively. They had a remembrance of freedom:
“One must confess that to bury people like Byelikov is a great pleasure. As we were returning from the cemetery we wore discreet Lenten faces; no one wanted to display this feeling of pleasure — a feeling like that we had experienced long, long ago as children when our elders had gone out and we ran about the garden for an hour or two, enjoying complete freedom. Ah, freedom, freedom! The merest hint, the faintest hope of its possibility gives wings to the soul, does it not? “We returned from the cemetery in a good humour. But not more than a week had passed before life went on as in the past, as gloomy, oppressive, and senseless — a life not forbidden by government prohibition, but not fully permitted, either: it was no better. And, indeed, though we had buried Byelikov, how many such men in cases were left, how many more of them there will be!” “That’s just how it is,” said Ivan Ivanovitch and he lighted his pipe. “How many more of them there will be!” repeated Burkin.
I thought about the Trump imitators who have learned from him what he’d been taught by his mentor, Roy Cohn, the chief counsel of the McCarthy hearings. People will believe a big lie more easily than a little lie, because they think nobody is so audacious as to tell such a lie, to repeat it, over and over, relentlessly. Never admit a mistake, never apologize, and always hit back twice as hard if somebody questions you. We see now the same behaviors in the Republican senators and representatives who want to be the next Trump. It is very much like a virus.
McCarthy was censured in 1954, as the Beat literary and social movement was underway, paving the road for the Magic Bus, and the most spontaneous expression of individual freedom since the roaring 20s. Cohn died of AIDS. Both sides remain, one leading back to an imagined past, the other, toward an imagined future.