Trump is befuddling the opposition with a combination of bravado, bullshit, and brutal realism. From Scott Ritter at consortiumnews.com:
At the security conference in Germany we just saw Trump make a classic adaptation of John Boyd’s OODA-loop to destroy his NATO and EU enemies.
The man’s enlarged my mind. He’s a poet-warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he’ll, uh, well, you’ll say hello to him, right? And he’ll just walk right by you, and he won’t even notice you. And suddenly he’ll grab you, and he’ll throw you in a corner, and he’ll say do you know that “if” is the middle word in life?
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you – I mean I’m no, I can’t — I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s, he’s a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas…”
—Unnamed photojournalist, Apocalypse Now
Lately I have been asked to try and make sense of Donald Trump and the first three weeks of his presidency.
And, more specifically, to comment on the drama that unfolded in Munich these past few days.
As I stumble through the mental gymnastics of trying to explain the unexplainable, my brain takes me to the classic Francis Ford Coppola film, Apocalypse Now, and the character of the “unnamed photojournalist” played in manic fashion by Dennis Hopper.
In a world strewn with freshly killed villagers, with war-painted murderers dressed as soldiers posturing in the background, Hopper’s character tries to tell a disbelieving Captain Willard (played magnificently by Martin Sheen) that the madness he sees around him represents a portal to a higher plane of thinking.
Just don’t pay attention to the truth your eyes are dispatching to your brain.
“The heads,” the unnamed photojournalist tells Willard. “You’re looking at the heads. Sometimes he goes too far. He’s the first one to admit it.”
The unnamed photojournalist is derived from the character of the Harlequin in Joseph Conrad’s classic novel, Heart of Darkness, from which Coppola fashioned the warped narrative of Apocalypse Now.
The Harlequin is a Russian sailor who served as Kurtz’s only European companion in the months leading up to the arrival of Marlow’s steamship. What Marlow sees as evidence of insanity, the Harlequin explains away as part of Kurtz’s grand design, incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t lost his own mind in the detached reality of Kurtz’s universe.
