The Tower and the Fool

The Tower and the Fool: A Kabbalistic Exegesis on the Life of Donald J. Trump

The man in the red tie—long as a phallus, longer than a noose—stalks the stage of history as if it were a cheap casino carpet. He raises his hand in benediction, in command, in sale. This is not the benediction of Moses who split the sea; this is the benediction of Mammon. To gaze at Donald Trump is to stare into the Qliphoth, the husks that cling to the Tree of Life, the residues of divine energy which have rotted, fermented, and become corruption. Yet we must look, because in looking we learn what the Tree of Life is not, and therefore what it is.

The Kabbalists say that each man is a letter, and that each letter has its numerical value, and that each numerical value reveals a secret. Donald John Trump:

• Donald = 4 + 50 + 40 + 30 + 4 = 128.
• John = 10 + 50 + 8 + 50 = 118.
• Trump = 400 + 200 + 6 + 40 + 80 = 726.

128 + 118 + 726 = 972. In Hebrew gematria, 972 collapses to 9 + 7 + 2 = 18. Eighteen is חי, “Chai,” life itself. How terrible the joke, how precise the irony! The man whose name reduces to “Life” built his empire on bankruptcy and towers of debt, his gold plated with tarnish, his wives replaced like the temple’s curtains. Life, yes—but a parody of life, a carnival mask.

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Consider his birth: June 14, 1946, beneath Gemini, the Twins. Here already is the duplicity, the double face, the Janus of Fifth Avenue. On one side, the cherubic boy, the patriot who declares he will make America great. On the other, the satyr who lusts, grabs, mocks. The Sephira of Hod (Glory) lies in Gemini’s shadow; Hod is intellect, the power of rhetoric, of persuasion, but when corrupted it becomes trickery, endless chatter, slogans and jingles: You’re fired!—that spell which America’s millions learned to chant as though it were the Tetragrammaton itself.

In youth, he was sent to the Military Academy. Mars ruled him early: discipline, uniform, parade. Yet the martial spirit never became Chessed (Mercy). It calcified into Geburah (Severity), but Geburah inverted: cruelty without justice, power without restraint.

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The Tarot offers him many guises. He is The Fool, stepping off the cliff with dog and knapsack, grinning as though gravity itself were beneath him. He is also The Tower, struck by lightning, disgorging its tenants, flames licking heaven. And still he is The Sun, for his followers see him as radiant, a child riding the white horse, halo of orange hair blazing like a false aureole. Fool, Tower, Sun—three trumps for Trump.

But the most telling is The Magician. Before him lies the table: cup, sword, wand, pentacle. He raises one finger heavenward and one downward: as above, so below. Except his table is a podium, his wand a microphone, his pentacle a stack of dollar bills, his chalice a plastic cup of Diet Coke. He channels not divine will but the collective hunger for spectacle. This, too, is magic. Even the black magician serves God, said Crowley, though he knows it not.

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Now Vollmann would demand that we look not only at symbols but at facts, smells, people bruised underfoot. Consider Atlantic City: the casinos yawning like sick whales, workers laid off, contractors unpaid, the poor seduced into dropping their wages into rigged machines. Consider the women: Ivana whispering about rape in the divorce deposition, Stormy Daniels with her silence bought in gold. Consider the migrant workers in his towers: Polish men in asbestos dust, undocumented, vanishing like ghosts, their wages skimmed.

And yet, the people. The old woman in Ohio who clutched her Trump sign like a rosary. The coal miner in West Virginia who believed the golden-haired tycoon would descend into the pit with him. The Christian who declared that God had chosen this unlikely vessel, this cracked pot, to hold His wine. Did they not, in their blindness, reveal the strange truth? For even the husks (Qliphoth) are vessels. The divine light, shattered in the beginning, hid within them. Trump, like a golem of clay and straw, staggers forward animated by sparks of holiness misplaced.

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The Kabbalists say that redemption comes through tikkun olam, repairing the world. But first, the shards must be exposed. Trump is that exposure. He reveals the cruelty of capital, the racism of the republic, the lust and the greed beneath the marble floors. He does not hide it with the velvet glove; he flaunts it, makes it costume jewelry. In that sense, he is an agent of the divine plan: to show the disease so that the body may bleed it out.

In his presidency we saw Malkuth—the Kingdom—corrupted. The throne itself became a gilded toilet seat. Yet above Malkuth lies Yesod, the foundation, the world of dreams and images. Trump spoke to Yesod. He spoke in dreams: walls, victories, greatness, the return of a mythic America. Dreams are truer than policies; the people loved him for his lies because they matched their inner fables.

Above Yesod lies Tifereth, beauty, the harmony of the human heart. Here Trump could not reach. His face—orange, bloated, sneering—repelled beauty. His soul was too coarse. The path between Yesod and Tifereth is the path of death, the card of Scorpio, and perhaps this is his destiny: to serve as death’s herald, the death of illusions, the death of civility.

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And Crowley whispers: Every man and woman is a star. Trump is a star, though a fallen one. His constellation is not the subtle silver of Nuit, but the vulgar neon of Times Square. He is the star that blinds, that advertises, that flickers on cheap motels. Yet still a star. Do not deny it. Thelema teaches that each star must pursue its True Will. Trump’s Will is dominion, attention, applause. He pursues it with the fervor of a monk chanting the Divine Name. In this sense he is more sincere than his critics: he wants power, he seeks it, he devours it. He does not veil the desire under a pretense of charity.

So what lesson do we glean from his life? Perhaps this: that the Path is perilous, and that even Life (חי) can manifest as Death, even the Tree can rot, even the Fool can ascend the throne. But also: that nothing is wasted. Trump’s excess, vulgarity, destruction—these too are sparks. The initiate must learn to look at the tower falling, the casino burning, and say: This, too, is God.

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He was born beneath Gemini. He may die beneath Scorpio. The Tower will fall again. And from its ruins perhaps something new may be built—not gilded, not gaudy, but humble, hidden, a true Kingdom. Until then, Donald John Trump, 972, Chai, Life-as-parody, lurches across the stage with his red tie swinging like a serpent, a false Messiah, yet still a vessel for the Holy One, Blessed be He, who works His will through the foolish, the grotesque, and the damned.

Barbarians Are Coming

The end of the world came and went and nothing perceptible changed. We stood around rubbing our eyes and blinking on a bright winter morning a week later asking each other how our end of the world was.
Josh, the honey guy as I thought of him, was wearing a pair of blue gloves with detachable mitten tips. These little caps were peeled back so he could work his digits and in each fist he held a jar of honey, a silent offer of trade. I told him how Lydia, who worked for the Bavarian Bakery, and I made music and danced with a church of ravers in a building like an old castle in Oakland. He nodded and told me that he attended three different solstice ceremonies in San Francisco, the last occurring at a beach in the Sunset district. My turn to nod.

We had all been here a week ago, a day after the twenty first, while a rainstorm raged all around us. As far as we could tell, that was the sum of the apocalypse, a cold heavy rain and a wind that threw canopies over backwards and tore their aluminum legs in half like a starving yeti mangling some black eyed Bhutanese doe.
We all huddled in our individual camps, by cars or trucks, and waved to each other through the tempest but couldn’t speak. Inside the back of a big white Cargo truck I was standing huddled with Sing and Backtaur by the portable tandori. We had hooked this and the steam table up to a propane tank  right inside the truck's cargo hold. Whenever some brave soul skittered across the parking lot under an umbrella I shouted:
“Samosas! One dollar!”
Often my shout drew them to us like a lighthouse beacon and they shivered below us, faces peering up over the mammoth truck's tail gate awaiting a cup of hot chai and some steaming curry.
In the moments when the storm was most violent we felt it battering the truck and fairly cringed looking at each other with wide eyes of amazement. Then Sing would laugh his pure, rich laughter and I would murmur:
“What a wind!”

Now and then the storm would tire itself out and be still. Then the birds came out and somehow found Sing, who always remembers to share the bounty of India Gourmet with the littlest market patrons. He threw his customary handfuls of basmati rice seasoned with cardamom pods to them. More birds than I had ever seen at the market came to the feast,  multicolored varieties; black with red wings, black with beady yellow eyes, tiny brown and black sparrows, larger brown speckled specimens with long yellow beaks,  lumbering midnight hued crows, side by side in a temporary truce, all gobbling up the offer with urgency.

“They are hungry.” Sing boomed with his deep musical voice, “They can’t get their breakfast in the storm.” He threw them more and more rice, a tall man with a jolly belly, a white beard, red turban, and big glittering brown eyes, a Sikh Santa of the birds.

So it rained, but the world was still there a few days later when the clouds blew away and we could come out and check.  We were disappointed, let's not dance around this point, we Americans born in America. We clearly wanted something to happen, probably different things depending upon each person's particular background. Flying saucers full of Mayans, or Jesus with laser eyes, or a spontaneous psychedelic awakening to free us from our petty and deeply artificial consumer culture.
We wanted to stare the grim reaper in the eyes in a way that was never possible in a society where children are told to close their eyes and step over the bodies of their massacred peers, where we are only permitted to see death once it has been washed and painted and put in a box lined with satin, where we are assured that our nation is the mightiest and will never fall so that what we really fear is an unbroken and monotonous horizon whereupon we will never see the outlines of approaching barbarians.

We hoped for a reprieve from the unending sameness and safety and guilt inducing comfort and might. We longed for something real.

I  think that secretly many of us held on to hope until New Year's Day. We let ourselves get excited again on the eve of December 30, fingers crossed for the twins, death and rebirth. Then we woke up and the sun was still shining. Is still shining.
But Americans will never give up. Even our elders were running like lemmings towards our artificially imposed fiscal cliff, seeking to plunge ourselves and the world into an economic down spiral, only turning back at the last possible moment.
Many others will no doubt arrive in public buildings with semiautomatic rifles in the coming months. We are a suicidal nation. It would be too difficult to admit that we are sick  and make changes. Much easier to set the world on fire so that we will never have to admit our shortcomings.

Or maybe change is here, fast and invisible, in the embracing of the artificial. Maybe we are saying goodbye to our earthy roots and our old social and moral codes as we somersault blindly into the heart of our techno creations without regret.
Our children will be the future, not our flesh and blood offspring, but our spawn  of micro chips and liquid crystal. The change may be here and we are simply blind to it as a mother is blind to the inch by inch growth of a tot she sees every day. Each morning it appears to be the same child and yet it is transforming right under mother's nose. In 20 years mother will be obsolete, all that the child needs of her it carries already within itself, in the software and hardware she provided. The child will spread its wings and fly and mother will be both a cast off shell and a voice within.

A death and a rebirth. All that we hoped for but dared not admit to ourselves. The other from within, the ultimate barbarian on the horizon.

Produce To Be Good

“Mommy what is capitalism?”
“ Oh, just another ism, like communism or despotism, only it’s the ism we’re living in. It’s a little complicated. You see the little fish gets eaten by a bigger fish who gets eaten by an even bigger fish who gets eaten by the biggest fish of all... We have to produce a lot of junk, like toys that break after you play with them once, clothes that rip after you wash them twice, and cars that fall apart after you pull out of the dealership. The best thing is for them to be produced in a U.S. territory, not the actual United States you see, but an island somewhere that no one has noticed or cares about. Then you can work foreigners to the bone and refuse them bathroom breaks and pay them pennies and still slap a tag that says “Made In America” onto your product. That’s how you make a profit. If Xu Lin doesn’t want to make the big bucks selling her body to support her family she gets a job in a factory making designer brand hand bags. Let’s say she makes 10 cents an hour and finishes 10 purses in one hour, how much did it cost to make one handbag? One cent. That’s right, although you also had to pay for materials so lets say that it costs you 4 cents per bag. Consequently you pay out a total of five cents. Then you sell the bag for $105. You earn a profit of $104.95. That’s capitalism. You could keep a factory here in the continental United States, but then you’d have to pay your workers at least minimum wage and you’ll probably have to offer them health insurance of some kind and that’ll cost you something too, so you’d end up earning a profit of only $95 dollars per bag. Clearly, you will make more money if you build your factory and hire somewhere over seas or just across the border in Mexico and take advantage of some truly impoverished peoples. You’re allowed to do that if you are a Capitalist, because capitalist are free. The other great thing about being a producer in a capitalist society is that you can form a corporation that will protect you from the consequences of your irresponsibility. For example, if I start pouring poisonous waste into our neighbor’s well to dispose of it cheaply and they get sick and die, I’ll have to go to jail. However, if my corporation pours water into my neighbor’s well and they get sick and die, the worst that can happen is that the corporation will get fined, but I won’t have to go to jail. That’s capitalism. In a capitalistic society you have the right to form a sociopathic entity to do all of your dirty work for you and you can sit back and reap the rewards. The other important part of capitalism is consuming. You need to buy a lot of things to be a good member of a capitalistic society. The more you buy the more money another capitalist makes. And the best part is that nobody tells us what to think. For example we can pray in whatever church we want to, or buy anything we want, or watch as much television as we want. Some of the other isms can’t do that because they are afraid if they watch certain shows or read certain books or pray to certain Gods or buy whatever they want then they’ll become capitalists too. And they’re probably right. Who wouldn’t want to be a capitalist? It’s the best ism of all!”