GOLDEN SHOWERS

I usually restrict my political thoughts to my other current blog, The Rohrabacher Letters. If I make an exception today, it's because I'm interested in the character and psyche of the man who sits in the Oval Office and who is capable of inflicting inestimable damage on the country he was "elected" to serve. (I use the quotation marks because it seems increasingly clear that the 2016 election results were dubious for a good number of reasons and, were it possible, should be voided).

As I noted on that other blog, I have had difficulty believing the one part of that now-infamous "Steele dossier" that made no sense to me. I refer to the scurrilous "golden shower" story, in which Trump was reported to have brought a number of prostitutes into his Moscow hotel room and paid them to urinate on the bed. This seemed to me too outrageous, too improbable even for a man of known (and admitted!) crass sexual behaviors. Aside from all other considerations, the risk of indulging in this fantasy in a Moscow hotel room seemed too fraught with peril even for a high-roller like Trump. When I visited Moscow, many years ago, it was widely known that hotel rooms in that city were the least secure of places. Why would Trump think otherwise?

So it was only on reading the tail end of a sentence in the long Jane Mayer article in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine that I found a convincing reason to believe the story. The performance, the article suggested, was staged in order to defile the bed in which the Obamas had once slept on a state visit. And suddenly the story made perfect sense. First, it fits inarguably with the character of the man, the petty, vengeful spirit that has so often been on display, especially with regard to President Obama and Trump's former political opponent, Hillary Clinton--whose memory seems to haunt him ceaselessly, like some Dickensian ghost of Christmas past. He cannot let either of them go. They are his go-to excuses for everything that goes wrong in his administration. He is obsessed with such a persistent, unfathomable hatred for both that we may justifiably suspect it to be rooted at some deep level of the unconscious mind, in the form of primal racism and misogyny.

The Obama hatred, I'm convinced, originated in that moment at the 2011 White House press dinner, when the former president had some innocent fun with Trump's absurd obsession with the birth certificate. (It's worth re-watching that speech, by the way; it proves uncomfortably prescient, toward the end, with a vision of a gaudy new facade to the White House.) It's clear, watching Trump during those few minutes, that he is not the slightest bit amused by Obama's light-handed, eloquent humor; and plausible, in retrospect, that what he experienced as a humiliating slight proved the motivation for the revenge he's currently wreaking on its source--and, not incidentally, on the country. Given the vulnerability of his ego and the absence of any sense of humor or perspective, what has happened since that speech looks to be a continuing act of self-justification and bitter vengeance.

So, yes, there is a dreadful and pathetic logic, even a kind of tragic necessity, to Trump's paying for prostitutes to piss on his predecessor's bed. To his relishing this petty act of getting even, and his choosing this most crassly sexual means of doing it. Along with many of my fellow Americans, I have been appalled by the open, aggressive and unapologetic moral depravity of the man who is supposed to represent us to the world.

Until now, though, I remained skeptical of this story that so aptly illustrates that depravity, but given the plausibility of this motivation, why, it does make perfect sense. And to righteous Buddhists who would fault me for furthering offensive revelations on the grounds of Right Speech, I say it is equally important for us to recognize and speak the truth, even when that truth is in itself repellent. We are not asked, nor indeed permitted, to close our eyes to the despicable behavior of those elected to positions of power over us.