One of the many things that makes the president’s tweet so cruel was our shocked discovery during our trip north this week on 101. I am 65 years old, nearly 66, a native Californian, and I have never seen California so dry.

The oaks, I think, are dying–their leaves a khaki shade I’ve never seen; the willows along empty riverbeds are as bare as trees in a Midwestern winter; the maples’ leaves are blanched, yellow, crisp as papyrus. The hills have dried beyond their normal wintertime yellow to a dull gray.

It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to visualize a terrible fantasy: California catching fire in Paso Robles and burning all the way to Morgan Hill, where there’s a smattering of green grass that won’t last another week. There is no rain in the forecast for yet another week, and there may be none the week after, either.

And here is what matters: We have a leader who is so blissfully stupid that he can’t distinguish between “climate” and “weather.” Beyond that, he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care about the land, our greatest inheritance and obligation; and he doesn’t care about Americans, including the sick among us; he despises immigrants who have made our history so rich, except for the richness in victimizing them; he doesn’t care about American workers–he rejoiced, to his rich friends, at Mar-a-Lago, about how he’d fleeced us in taxes they will never pay and that we won’t see for years to come, when it’s too late for us to realize, preoccupied as we are with mortgages and car payments and credit-card usury, that we’ve been robbed.

He doesn’t care about our heritage and knows nothing about our history. He thinks Frederick Douglass is still alive; is amazed that no one but he knows that Lincoln was a Republican. He visited Gettysburg with Steve Bannon.

 

 

He knows nothing about working hard, a drudgery he leaves to lawyers and Executive Assistants, he knows nothing about about the world, including the tradition we owe the West and the fractures, mutually inflicted, between the Orient and the West, between Islam and Christianity, and, last, the wounds inflicted by men on women, the latter a group he rejoices in wounding because he finds such strength and validation in humiliating them.

 

 

California humiliated him in the November Election. And so California could very well burn from Paso Robles to Morgan Hill, and he wouldn’t care.

Of course, he would read a speech afterward, California’s official obituary, about our immolation. But he would read from a teleprompter the way he read about the struggle for civil rights a few weeks ago in Mississippi, the way a chagrined fourth-grader reads aloud when called on by his teacher in his reading circle: flat-toned, impassive–emotionless, save for petulance, because–can we be honest?–he doesn’t care.

Finally, there is no group he cares for less than our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. California will be burned by their time, I guess.

He will be dead then by then, I hope, as fat and sleek (and as indifferent) as Nero. His post-mortem will reveal arteries collapsed in plaque, snapped shut by double orders of Big Macs, Filet o’ Fish, and personal buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

He will be perfectly embalmed. His hair will be as golden as Caligula’s. He will wear his blue suit and red-striped tie, made in China–he will be dressed, in death, by morticians, as he was dressed, in life, by servants. His body will ride in a flag-draped mahogany coffin towed atop its caisson in solemn parade, flanked by young men and women from every service branch. The caisson in turn will be pulled by a team of sixteen-hand greys, their hooves polished brilliant black; these magnificent animals will be guided along Pennsylvania Avenue by the soldiers of the Old Guard.

 

 

It was the Old Guard that carried President Kennedy’s body, in my memory, to its rest in Arlington. Before that, in the last weeks of fascism’s collapse, in memories that are buried with my parents, the Old Guard accompanied Franklin Roosevelt’s body at the beginning of its journey home to Hyde Park.

I don’t think there will be their kind of dignity in Trump’s last public moment because his legacy will be so bitter. There will be only smatterings of mourners, little knots of dead-enders at street corners, watching silently as his cortege crosses the Arlington Memorial Bridge over the Potomac and into Virginia.

By then, everything behind the procession will have been burnt to ashes by America’s Nero. The ashes will be all that remains of what we once valued as a people.

Except for one thing more.

We will still have each other.

But we will have to learn to live beyond him and without him, and, finally, we will have to learn how to live with each other once more. Maybe then, and only then, we can learn to be Americans again.