The Frankenstein of the United States

Who the hell created Donald Trump?

To explain the origins of the incredible candidacy of the New York billionaire to the presidency many politicians and experts have relied with insistence on Frankenstein, one of the very myths of modern times. It is the story of a colossal monster who rebels against thescientist who created him. These observers point to the toxic environment bred by the Republicans for several decades. Trump is the extreme incarnation of forces sparking the fires of fear, racism and xenophobia, a spurious monster that is almost impossible to control.

This easy formula,, the equation that compares Trump to the Monster and his Party, the Maker, regardless how ludicrous does not help, however to solve the must urgent problem of how to confront the belligerence of this billionaire and stop his catastrophic race to the White House.
For this we should refer to the novel, Frankenstein, written two centuries ago in the summer of 1818 by a young woman called Mary Shelley. It leads us beyond the simplification of a complex and revealing fable that has been reduced by popular culture.

I admit having succumbed, as a child, to the pleasures of this simplification.

The first time I learned about the monster was in 1949 through a film Abbott and Costello Against Ghosts. I was seven and remember holding the hand of my mother on my way home from the film, in Manhattan, to our home in Queens where Donald Trump also lived. He was three years
old then.

I imagine that Trump would have knocked out the ghastly giant of a punch in the face, to mentions some of his swagger against those who protest his meetings; but I must confess I shook with fear. Although I confess I was fascinated, and decided to overcome my apprehension by going to several of his many rages from Frankenstein to that film version by James Whale from The fiancée of Frankenstein and the Son of Frankenstein and even the ghost of Frankenstein in which Lon Chaney substituted the perpetual Boris Karloff.

My mother did not object to coming with me to those films always if I promised to read the original novel where I would discover that Frankenstein, she explained “is not a monster but the arrogant genius who designed him. And this will lead to some doubts that are not easily explained”. After drinking from this source in my late adolescence I was tortured by one question that must have disturbed Mary Shelley during her vacation in Switzerland with Lord Byron and her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, when she began writing Frankenstein: who is the real monster, the deformed creature who comes alive or his too ambitious creator?

Asking the same question years later we must study in depth the frightening appearance of Trump: the fact that many citizens vote for a man who feeds on fear and rests on torture and mass deportations.
Were it not for the many disturbed people who project their uncertainties, nightmares and desires, Trump would not exist. Aren’t the true monsters the men and women who are charmed by his charisma
and belligerence, his constant celebration of greed and machismo?

The temptation to build an enormous wall against those contenders, separate them from our lives and sight is often overbearing. All the more reason to be careful not to imitate the followers of Trump, degrading and demonizing as if they were an invading and malignanthorde.

It is precisely this dehumanization of the Other that the novel by Mary Shelley criticizes. Although most film versions silence the monster that in the book has a fragile and desperate soul, capable of expressing his loneliness, only asking not to be judged by his deformed exterior. Am I delirious and being too candid if I suggest that what we should feel for the Trump followers is pity and compassion? Leaving aside the irredeemable neo Nazi fanatics on the side lines; perhaps the large majority of those voting for Trump do
not reside in existential desolation that is synthesized in the epigraph of Lost Paradise by Milton that is quoted in the first page of Frankenstein, when Adam calls on God who made him: “I asked/from what darkness did you make me?”

It is possible that these armies created Trump and encouraged his revolt but, what merciful God brought them up from darkness and made them feel so lost and defenseless, so rabid and burdened by the economic crisis that they need to rely on a demagogue who appeals to the most vile instincts and uses sadness and insecurity of others to increase his power?

Although Trump may end up defeated these confused citizens are going to remain among us. They are a true challenge. If the darkest region of United States history gave them origin, stimulating the wish for a Superman like Trump to save them then he should be the brightest America that should, after looking in the mirror, answer to the frustrations of those rabid, convince them to leave from an abysm false conspiracies and begin to fight the more visible demons of war, poverty, inequality of gender and ecological cataclysm threatening all
of us; the real terrors and monsters that must be conquered from either side.

Only if we find a manner to shed those followers of Trump in his dreams and suspicions, to find a way that includes a solution to theproblems of our time. Only in that case can the last words of Mary Shelley in her novel be marvelously prophetic when she bids farewell to the Monster and adds there are monsters in all of us: “Soon you will be taken far by the waves and be lost in obscurity and distance”.