What the Great Writers & Thinkers from a Long Time Ago Are Saying about Donald Trump
When I was in graduate school, a prominent literary scholar and critic at Yale, Harold Bloom, published a book called The Anxiety of Influence. Instantly, everyone in literary studies read it, and if they hadn’t, they said they had. It was that kind of book.
Bloom made the claim—surprising at first glance—that a current writer might be the greatest influence on a writer from the past—that the greatest influence on Walt Whitman (19th century), say, might well be Wallace Stevens (20th century).
How does that work?
Bloom simply meant that after you’ve read and understood Wallace Stevens, you’ll never look at Walt Whitman in the same way, no matter the order in which you read them, and so your reading of Stevens has greatly influenced your reading of Whitman. Since reading is the only way we gain access to these authors, Stevens has influenced [your reading of] Whitman.
Not really an overwhelming insight, but one that does free us up to say outlandish things—Martin Scorsese influenced William Shakespeare!—and get away with it after all the qualifications are set in motion.
For me, it works well in music. I listen to Woody Guthrie, then I listen to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Dylan and Springsteen are, for me, the two greatest influences on Woody Guthrie. Meaning simply that they are the two greatest influences on how I listen to Guthrie, on how I recognize that part of Guthrie that Dylan and Springsteen heard, found, developed, and displayed in their own sound.
And so it is that occasionally I find something written by someone who lived and wrote long before Donald Trump became President, and I realize that I’m pausing on a certain passage only because Trump is in office. It’s like a little discovery: Wow, I say to myself, Homer was talking about Trump, and for a micro-second I have that liberating experience of believing that Homer was taking on our President. That’s helpful because now Homer is on my side, and as we try to negotiate the deep divisions that mark our country, we’re choosing sides and building teams, and I’m happy to claim Homer as a team member.
I don’t want to push this analogy too far. I only want to leave a record of how, one reader, at least, as he wanders through centuries of writing on the lookout for instruction, friendship, and community has found a lot of support, particularly as I begin this project in the COVID-19 era, the period of The Great Isolation under the Presidency of Donald Trump.
I will use these pages to console myself and maybe you as well, Gentle Reader (there is much of the 18th century in what I am setting out to do), because I have spent so much time “reading” Donald Trump, that I can, for example, say that George Orwell was often writing about Donald Trump.
And I’m happy to have George on my team.
Note: I will include my discoveries in separate, stand-alone brief essays to follow. The formulaic titles of each essay (What “X” Said About Donald Trump & His Administration) will make it readily identifiable as another entry in the series.
