Time and a Trump Presidency

September 24, 2016 Jerry King Comments 0 Comment

Recently I was pointed to a New Yorker article by a friend. Evan Osnos composed a fulsome speculative forecast of what type of presidency is likely should Donald Trump be elected. Osnos writing was well researched with many interviews over several months time with individuals connected to the candidate. Donald Trump has placed great stock in his authenticity. He is an ego maniac, a blowhard, a charlatan businessman, an entertainer, and the standard bearer for the Republican Party. With this in mind I asked, how would our concept of the world be transformed by four years of Trump? The world is constructed by our minds, arising from our reciprocal interactions. We construct reality. What world would we make with Trump at the levers of State for four years? I can do no better than offer this excerpt from Alan Lightman’s magisterial book on Time. What do you think?

3 May 1905
Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined.

On the terrace of the Bundesterrasse is a striking view: the river Aare below and the Bernese alps above. A man stands there just now, absently emptying his pockets and weeping. Without reason, his friends have abandoned him. No one calls any more, no one meets him for supper or beer at the tavern, no one invites him to their home. For twenty years he has been the idea friend to his friends, generous, interested, soft-spoken, affectionate. What could have happened? A week from this moment on the terrace, the same man begins acting the goat, insulting everyone, wearing smelly clothes, stingy with money, allowing no one to come to his apartment on Laupenstrasse. Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past?

In Zurich, strict laws have recently been approved by the Council. Pistols may not be sold to the public. Bank and trading houses must be audited. All visitors, whether entering Zurich by boat on the river Limmat or by rail on the Selnau line, must be search for contraband. The civil military is doubled. One month after the crackdown, Zurich is ripped by the worst crimes in its history. In daylight, people are murdered in the Weinplatz, paintings are stolen from the Kunsthaus, liquor is drunk in the pews of the Munsterhof. Are these criminal acts not misplaced in time? Or perhaps the new laws were action rather than reaction?

A young woman sits near a fountain in the Botanischer Garten. She comes here every Sunday to smell the white double violets, the musk rose, the matted pink gilly flowers. Suddenly, her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? By what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic?

In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their prediction become post-dictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.

Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighted for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncles not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their resumes, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future. Each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.