From the Bin (again!)
By now the readers of From the Bin wiIl have watched, or at least know of, Gaza 2025 What’s Next? – the 30 second video that President Trump released for the edification of the millions who voted for him and those who support him throughout our world. I had already watched it of course, but I made myself watch Trump’s Gaza again with care. I recommend my readers do the same. The video has been described as “bizarre” and “disgusting”. It is all that, but it is also more. It gives us an insight into the imaginings of the most powerful narcissist in the world. He who must be obeyed; he whose support for the genocide in Gaza cannot even be mentioned.
Trump is the He, who the leaders of Europe – Macron of France, Starmer of the UK – have gone to on a pilgrimage. Starmer bore the gift of a personal invitation for Trump to come and meet the Monarch of England (My God! be still my beating heart!). Both Macron and Starmer got to touch Trump. How they must have trembled inside as they begged Trump not to leave them alone to the untender mercies of that rough Russian beast – Vladimir Putin.
But while the pilgrims, Macron and Starmer, closed their eyes in holy dread, we now know what Trump was desiring. His video reveals that Trump has looked into the seeds of time and seen a world where he gets to ogle a belly dancer, suck cocktails with Bibi Netanyahu and watch the world’s richest oligarch Elon Musk make it rain dollars. And at the heart of this brave new world there is a giant golden statue of Donald Trump.
What more is there to desire? Well, the great Utopian thinker Miguel Absensour (1939-2017) once wrote that “Desire must be taught to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire otherwise.”
We have now seen the tawdry desires of the ageing Satyr, who “leads the Free World”. Like the man whose only tool is a hammer is perpetually seeing only nails to smack, the real estate agent in the White House is always looking to foreclose on another property deal. And what is more, in his desired imaginary, the people adore and love him for it all.
But our task is to reject the vision of the Presidential Narcissist. We must desire something different.We must desire something better for humanity than standing slack-jawed, while the world richest oligarch Elon Musk gets to gobble hummus.
A clue to what we must desire is contained in the great revolutionary poem Ozymandias by Shelley:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
A lifetime ago, old Brother Magee taught us, a class of 16 year olds, that poem. At the end of the reading, he said, “Boys, man proposes, but only God disposes”. For Brother Magee the poem was about the famous lines from Ecclesiastes – “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities: all is vanity”.
Of course, Bro Magee’s reading of the poem is a legitimate one, and he did succeed in his aim of depressing a room full of adolescents. Talk of shooting fish in a barrel! But there is another reading of the poem, and it is one that would have been closer to Shelley’s heart. The poem tells of the fall of the pharaoh Ramesses II -one of the most powerful of tyrannical narcissists. Shelley’s poem tells us that “This too shall pass. The tyrant who today inspires fear and awe will one day be overthrown.” The tyrant proposes, true. But one day the people will dispose of all tyrants.
Trump has shown us all what he proposes for Gaza – the genocidal elimination of an entire people. We can pretend with our rulers that we have not seen it. Or we can support the heroic resistance of the people of Palestine who face the powerful tyrant and his murderous hirelings, spit in their faces, and say “No Pasaran!”
From the Bin
28 February 2025