The Wild Card

Could Trump’s scandalous brashness represent a new form of hope? Our author has traveled to New York in order to come to terms with America.

During my landing in New York, I was preparing myself mentally for several tasks ahead of me. One of them was to find out what the Trump problem is really all about. An unpleasant task for sure, and unappetizing; the gut reaction that many speak of manifested itself immediately. And if I wanted to make a judgment of the situation, as people tend to do naturally – the instinct to sense disgust with moral prejudices – the result would be obvious. However, one doesn’t need to judge politicians as people. One needs unbiased information. To understand Trump – his movements, his intentions, and his constraints – requires no less than understanding the deeply parochial, often irrational-historical, yet no less massively complex system of American politics.

Ultimately, and perhaps unsatisfyingly, what we will find is that this president will mean something different in every state, indeed in every backwoods town out there. Americans are so realistic in every ideology that their opinions often depend on realizing or impeding a certain project that they have become embroiled in. The fact that the bleeding hearts of this world do not typically go into politics is probably clear to anyone who is not.

The governed do not have to love these figures; they primarily act as the watchdog to the quality of the crumbs that fall from the table of global money-politics into each respective region. Particularly because everything that smells of social state does not come at all naturally to the majority of most Americans – improving one’s status is for them equivalent to courting investors. If one gets lucky, the investors are a godsend, building public goods such as bridges and roads, that which all people have a stake in. Employment is the big topic. The fact that, as in Germany, the wages are often so terrible, that two working people are unable to feed a family, is completely ignored by everyone involved or taken with a sigh, shrugged off as a fact of life. If one has a job, life goes on as normal; one gets credit, and as long as one doesn’t get sick or an essential appliance does not break, one lives from work day to work day. In a tacit way, maybe it is also essential that one has no time to contemplate the misery.

Who is guilty of this dust mop of a president and what will he do and allow for whom? The speculations not only concern those whom he had promised something, but above all those who are putting pressure on him to fulfill those expectations. Leverage is tool number one among resistance groups – I miss the strategic action of American style protest. But when one starts to think like the strategic chess player the same thought keeps coming back: Trump’s scandalous brashness could also represent a form of opportunity. A refreshing wild card as head of state, entirely according to the ancient Chinese ideal of the regent, who doesn’t need to do anything because his system works on its own, right?

We have indeed made certain in Austria in the half year between election and repeat election, that we have no need for a president. I don’t know, and excitedly greet the first familiar representatives of the army at the border and its overwhelmingly black security officers, whose ugly work carried out with plodding resignation represents for me better than anything else the countenance of the U.S.. While, any return the friendliness, not a few – mostly white sheriff-types and toxic young Hispanic border officers – remain strict. Their humorlessness expresses itself with the preference to act as if they could only, regardless if one asks or says, only answer from their repertoire of canned phrases. I rub my eyes and try not to let myself be provoked to hate and close-mindedness. I want to walk through the country like a light, Mayakovski-esque (Vladimir Mayakovsky – early Soviet poet) drizzle, like a Japanese rainfall in the sunlight, an all-pervasive insight-machine, with open eyes, on the hunt for the right questions. From Jamaica Station to Lexington Avenue I glance from face to face, trying to stifle my exhausted form of curiosity. When we climb out of the subway station, it is dark and pouring, from full, apparently inexhaustible clouds.

Many speak of the becalming illusion now shattering, that which had formed around the good-looking, educated, elegant President Obama. It may be not pleasant, but it is cathartic and necessary in order to bring the self-perception of the U.S. once again closer to reality. Unfortunately, I ascertain that the fears are nonetheless exceptionally concrete, so near as they are grim. Everything that one considers as good and useful in a government has now the potential to be eliminated in accordance with the Hungarian model of government, in which one, as the Austrians say, can turn the money faucet on and off. Trump’s billionaires will certainly fulfill this role. Not that one can speak of streams at all, they are at best meager IV drips. Almost anything that was already functioning can be eliminated. But the value of all those institutions and initiatives that make up a good government, not only since the invention of democracy, is often only noticed when they are lacking.

Those New York bookstores, where I used to receive good wishes like a sailor on shore-leave, have been closed in the meantime. I don’t go at all to the cafe that, to me, encapsulated everything I liked about the city; I am not in the mood to give myself over to the night and its people. The rents in New York are, just as always, beyond all reason. A shared apartment with a $1,000 rent is still considered a deal. Economic senselessness is the standard here, the love of New York has become monetized, a sentiment shared by all classes. Because there is no room to eat at the deli, we freezingly shove down a mediocre $9 sandwich in Central Park, behind a 6-foot tall fence with a view of the Gothic skyscrapers of the West Side beyond a large pond where mandarin ducks are circling. We sadly throw our disproportionately large amount of trash from the small lunch into the garbage bin [1]. I can’t do America.

When we walk by the smooth, black tower, whose security costs the city $35 million, we find two lone protesters, a woman (“TRUMP/INCOMPETENT/IMMORAL”) on one side of the street, a man (“SANTA TO TAKE TRUMP TO THE NORTH POLE”) on the other. Confused aesthetics. “The first few weeks we protested, but little by little the motivation disappeared,” one Columbia University student explains to me. “The students are all worried about their careers, their schedules are very full.” In such conversations someone always exclaims that the urgency within the underground and grassroots organizations will now flourish. The statement is not reassuring. It is merely the last dregs of positive thinking, and indeed this positive thinking has already become annoying in light of disastrous reality. The urgency to ally oneself with a more pragmatic movement remains. The bubble, in which it seemed enough to merely identify oneself with pop culture references and the right behavior, is now bursting; now real actions are being questioned.

“To connected, motivated individuals seeking an outlet with the hard-working groups that need their participation and support” is a phrase used by the Forward Union to boil down their essence. The artist Katie Holten told me about herself and several mostly women-led demonstrations and art happenings like NASTY WOMEN that are supposed to unify agitated individuals. Particularly for those isolated artists, such actions are often an art lifeline, she explains, and I am reminded once again how gigantic and rural the United States is.

Reminiscences of the first women’s rights activists ignite my imagination for a moment, maybe because Katie Holten seems like one who can fend for herself and won’t lose her nerve in any situation even when, as she explains, she hasn’t slept in a week. Only in the second moment do I remember the connection to Trump’s misogyny. Katie corrects my stammering in a similar spirit: “We try not to say Anti-Trump. It’s Pro-Love,” she says. This orientation calms many of my concerns of focusing too much on Trump who nonetheless stands at the center of a multiplicity of issues. However, Holten also tells me something that surprises me, that after the election of Trump, as in the United Kingdom after Brexit, hate-fueled confrontations in the street have increased abruptly, as if they were now allowed. Would that have been the case in Austria as well? Was it, is it already that way? Is a gruesome polyp of racist and hateful behavior slumbering in every society that can only be held at bay by the government’s superficial values of tolerance and peace? I can’t believe it. I should read Bachtin once again in order to brace myself for the carnival-esque world, for the explosions of suppressed demons…But what good are books now?

In the Hewitt sisters’ Museum of Art and Design we find an exhibition of actions and inventions to make survival in the deserted carcass of overflowing capitalism that is the U.S. somewhat more feasible. Gardens, energy collectives, water stations, and information boards for border-crossers, a plow made of bicycles including iPad mount. I try to imagine to myself the steps required to construct the conveniences of social welfare infrastructure in DIY mode. It would be difficult because I don’t like the people and think, as a typical American woman, that they’re all acting dumb. Everyone must be able to live, however; the dumb, the assholes, the annoying, the boring, and the neurotic…only social structure can achieve that – or people with principles. I nod my head in respect for the heroes who are taking over the work of the local government in all these cities in each of their respective neighborhoods – for the most part they are women.

One statistic in the stairwell was for me the true spectacle of the exhibition. It predicts that Americans will no longer be able to afford a one-bedroom apartment with their existing budgets. A room in a two-bedroom apartment will only be available to those with higher salaries. That means that most Americans must either choose to be homeless or make concessions and take on debt in order to afford their everyday lives. These are Third World conditions; it is the new form of the grotesque, that a living standard is promoted as an aspiration which is societally demanded yet cannot be reached with the prevailing wage levels. It is so out of place with traditional American values that it is simply repressed.

[1] The character of every country can be found in its design. One trashcan is now three. A somewhat ingenious design concept has scaled camera shutter-like openings to each form of trash: the smallest for bottles, the middle-size for paper, and largest for the rest. Later on, while we were trying to orient ourselves, we saw one of these famous signs, which reminded me once again of a proud and somehow lonely Americanism: this and that investment firm, proclaimed where one would typically look for directions to the next destination, has financed the sanitation services for the next mile. The sign itself must have accounted for a good portion of that donation.