A Necessary Rejoinder

Oddly enough, these days, many of the most righteous Puritan scolds are players for the wrong team. I dislike being censorious, but I feel obliged to note the incongruity of rising from one’s knees on the public lavatory floor to climb aloft an imaginary pulpit to condemn “indecency.”

Andrew Sullivan is not merely guilty of what they used to refer to as “the sin too horrible to be named among Christians.”¹ He has been a major strategist for, and promoter of, the cultural and political shift moving sexual inversion from its traditional status as a grave and shameful mental and moral disorder to being viewed, at least by today’s elite Community of Fashion, as a natural identity, a legitimate political community, an appropriate department of academic study, a legally-protected category. and a worthy cause.

Andrew has clearly successfully hypnotized himself into forgetting that, prior to the rather recent success of the campaign he prominently spearheaded, resulting in our current contemporary, and likely to prove ephemeral, cultural derangement, his personal predilection has been viewed generally, throughout history (with minor exceptions in Antiquity) everywhere with horror and contempt and looked upon not only as “indecent” but even as a crime.

Its associated culture has traditionally been a criminal subculture, existing in opposition to, and with animosity and contempt toward, conventional morality, the family, country, and religion. It was no accident that Britain’s famous Cambridge traitors were homosexuals.

Andrew himself, additionally, is HIV-positive which ought to have disqualified him from US entry and did disqualify him from Naturalization prior to 2010 in the reign of President Caliban. Andrew’s arrest for pot-possession on federal land in Cape Cod in 2009 should still have prevented his Naturalization in 2011, but changing his coat and switching political sides gained him special preferential treatment. Andrew is welcome to his good luck, but he ought to avoid preaching.

Andrew Sullivan is obviously a talented and entertaining commentator, and I actually dislike being put in the position of having to point out his own sins to him, but climbing up on that high horse and telling us we cannot look away from Donald Trump’s indecency was awfully rich stuff. People in lavender houses shouldn’t be throwing stones labeled “indecency.”

And let’s just contemplate Mr. Trump for a bit. A great many Americans, a number sufficient to elect him to the presidency three times at least twice, see Trump as a happy alternative to misrule by a destructive, hostile, totally demented Community of Fashion bent on instituting Socialism and destroying America.

Trump is widely viewed by ordinary Americans as a Till Eulenspiegel sort of figure, a vulgar trickster who mocks, trips up, and gets the better of the stuffy, pompous, and annoying Establishment.

Andrew was born too late, in 1963, I fear, to be familiar with an especially favorite character of Victorian readers. Yet, even today, literate members of the Trans-Atlantic equestrian community still read with pleasure the sporting novels of Robert Smith Surtees.

Those familiar with Surtees will easily recognize Trump’s resemblance to the rich Cockney tea merchant of Great Corum Street, John Jorrocks who accepts the opportunity, and financial burden, of the Mastership of the, fallen on hard times, Handley Cross Hunt.

Jorrocks is very fat, very vulgar, and very stingy. Jorrocks is no gentleman. He is flawed in many ways. He drops the aitches in front of some words and adds aitches in front of others. He rides a cheap elderly, unsightly horse named Artaxerxes, and he’s a terrible rider, thoroughly frightened of jumping.

But... Jorrocks is, underneath it all, able and effective and he loves hunting with real passion.

“Fox-’unting is indeed the prince of sports. The image of war, without its guilt, and only half its danger. I confess that I’m a martyr to it—a perfect wictim—no one knows wot I suffer from my ardour.—If ever I’m wisited with the last infirmity of noble minds, it will be caused by my ingovernable passion for the chase. The sight of a saddle makes me sweat. An ‘ound makes me perfectly wild. A red coat throws me into a scarlet fever. Never throughout life have I had a good night’s rest before an ‘unting morning.”

Jorrocks’ passion for hunting makes him open his pocket book and makes him jump hedges, fences, and ditches despite his fear. Jorrocks also proves a success as an MFH. He brings his business sense, his economy and reliable efficiency to the management and operation of the organized hunt. Jorrocks’ faults are redeemed by the combination of competence and his great and authentic love of Hunting.

Donald Trump is our American Jorrocks. Andrew Sullivan is perfectly correct in noting Trump’s indecorum, his bad manners, his only-too-frequent lapses from gravitas. Trump is not a gentleman in the American sense. He is non-U, an American cockney, the recognizable product of an Outer Borough. He wears bright Royal Blue (not Navy Blue) suits most of the time and mostly with a bright red tie that he ties too long. He used to dye his white hair blond and wear it in a bizarre combover in an effort to conceal his male-pattern baldness. He also used to use some sort of tanning product that made his face orange. Happily, in recent months, he’s quit the hair dye and the tanning product, and has a better (though more honest and revealing) hairdo. Why! he even on occasion wears a better suit and a different tie!

Trump is a brash, self-promoting businessman straight out of NYC real estate, an exceedingly rough business in a town that makes the real estate business all-but-illegal. For all of Trump’s foibles and flaws, he has succeeded in that business internationally on a tremendous scale. He made himself into a celebrity and a household name, and won the Presidency as a complete political outsider and non-war hero, something never before done.

Andrew is wrong. Donald Trump is vulgar and uncouth, but he is not indecent. Trump, well into old age, when many men are content in rocking chairs, has repeatedly flung himself into the intense struggle and conflicts of electoral politics, and has taken up the burdens of the activity, the travel, the long hours, and the pressure of the Presidency. Trump has faced lawfare prosecutions, the legal costs, and the potential prospect of disgrace and imprisonment in advanced old age. Trump has endured a volume of vitriol and political and attacks that only a few other presidents have. He has survived two assassination attempts and taken a bullet wound to serve. He has even, as a former president, lived to have his home invaded by FBI agents with machine guns to trash his privacy and rifle his wife’s underwear drawers.

Donald Trump is a lot of things, but he is obviously a sincere patriot. And I would suggest to Andrew that he is totally mistaken. Andrew mistakes the superficial for the substance. Trump is vulgar, but Trump is not “indecent.” In his own peculiar way, Donald Trump is a hero and a great president.

“Come hup! I say - You ugly beast!”

1. Ephesians 5 3-5.