America, Thou Are Bound Under A Knave

A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a

base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,

hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a

lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,

glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;

one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a

bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but

the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander,

and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch…

From Shakespeare’s King Lear

I had considered editing this excerpt, from a speech in King Lear, but it is by itself a perfect description of the person and the nature of one Donald John Trump. How the man managed to get himself elected to the office of the Presidency, amounts to a cruel joke, a hoax as it were, perpetrated upon thousands of the well-meaning, the well-intentioned and those seeking some thing in the way of political solace in what they thought at the time, was an era of wilderness.

But that we knew then what we know now.

It is not in the nature of a knave to be a leader. The word “knave” derives from German where the original term described a boy, a male child. The derivative meanings of the term emerged later and by Shakespeare’s time, when the word meant a person of if not low birth (base), certainly low moral character (a bawd), certainly untrustworthy (coward, pander).

And what is Donald Trump, if even in his own mind? A showman, an impresario of chicanery and the masterful arts of blandishment and deceit. And should those talents fail him, there is the proud nature of his tongue (and his twitter finger) willing to say nothing good to the credit of anyone who displeases him. The term “finical” intrigued me. It is defined as similar to the word “finicky” which is rarely mentioned without the pulling of face, with a tone of disdain in an inflection that bespeaks eyes closed, head-shaking, annoyance.

In 2016, the knave was elected President of a truly proud and accomplished nation state, a country of wealth and power, indeed a place of such opportunity that an acclaimed concert hall still bears the name of a Scotch immigrant who by virtue of his own intelligence and acumen became one of the nation’s wealthiest men and its most generous. The knave would claim kinship as a businessman and as a Republican. He should not.

Consider it an act of treason not to cast a vote against him on November 3, 2020.