Hello, out there. I took a break from my blog last year to go on academic sabbatical, an increasing rarity these days, for which I’m deeply appreciative, in order to finish my book in progress (mum’s the word for now). And, the state of the world has seemed to speak for itself in sombre tones of despair. What could I add?

Yet, one of my favorite, sustaining, quotations when I was a teenager was from Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” I wrote it into a blank book I had of inspirational, existential quotations and illustrations. At a time when my family life had been torn, I found a way to a private determination.

Although it isn’t my work as a professor to “indoctrinate” students (it really isn’t) or to teach them how to be activists, I do find myself often fielding statements of despair and thinking about how to counter them, or offer some hope, some life wisdom about the importance of not giving in to the psy ops warfare that we little people have no agency. “Burn it all down and start over,” students say sometimes as a response to their feeling of powerlessness before a political and economic system that is doubling-down on burning down the planet and everything in it. I get it. And yet, I don’t think that will necessarily yield the results we want. Trauma begets more trauma. And traumatized people who don’t understand, can’t heal from, their own trauma continue to traumatize others. The American Revolution did not free women and racial minorities, nor did the French. Another two hundred years were required to make significant progress.

What I can do, as an English professor, is teach texts that shed light on these matters, recommend readings, perform rhetorical analyses that empower students to undertake their own development. So, for instance, in one class this semester we read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, about a mariner who sails up the Congo River to retrieve a rogue ivory trader in King Leopold II’s personal fiefdom and torture chamber; Alberto Moravia’s The Conformist, about an Italian fascist who plots to murder his former professor; and Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing, about “the color bar” in rural Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia). We got inside the heads of the perpetrators, because it’s there that the problem lies, not with the victims or the heroes. What makes an exploiter, a fascist, a racist, a sexist? Ideology. To be clear, there is no one to admire or emulate in these novels, no heroes. NO ONE. And that is the point. In societies founded on exploitation and trauma, no one is free, no one is safe, no one is not a collaborator, except children and non-humans.

Reading the New York Times this morning, I was titillated by a statement by President Trump. Interviewed on Fox news about the need for H1-B visas to hire foreign workers for high-skilled jobs, he said the visas were needed to attract talent to the US.

“’We have plenty of talented people,” Ingraham said. ‘No, you don’t,’ Trump replied.”

You. YOU don’t have talented people. What? Is Trump moving to Saudi Arabia and relinquishing his US citizenship?

Besides DARVO Don doing his deny-attack-reverse-victim-and-offender shtick, the telling word is “you.” Trump distances himself from the problem (it’s our problem he’s trying to save us from, not his), and from the solution (it’s our education system that is failing, not his). Out of one side of his mouth he dismantles our vaunted academic research institutions, out of the other he chastizes us for failing to produce the workers we need. Tails-you-lose, heads-I-win. Not my circus, not my monkeys, says our executive leadership.

But ideology and rhetoric cannot always erase the effects of empirical reality. As much as Jim in Conrad’s Lord Jim runs away from his desertion of a ship full of Muslim pilgrims en route to Mecca, reality dogs his heels. And the more Marlow, the narrator, attempts to whitewash Jim’s reputation, the more obvious–to a discerning reader, at least–is Marlow’s desperation to rewrite history.

“But a few things are different now. In his first term, Trump inherited a good economy from Barack Obama, and the establishment Republicans who surrounded him prevented him from tanking it with major trade wars or mass deportations. Much of Trump’s base distrusted these figures, seeing them as part of a deep state cabal trying to thwart his populist agenda. But they shielded the country from at least part of the price of Trump’s erraticism.

“This time, however, Trump came into office with a much shakier economy, and, unrestrained by Washington technocrats, has proceeded to make it worse, putting the country in a sour mood.”

You can run, but you can’t always hide.