Translated from the Portuguese

By Mark Blickley

 

Artist’s note:

This past fall, I co-curated an exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal, Tributaries, that opened on Sept. 30th and ran for ten weeks, under the auspices of the international artist’s cooperative, Urban Dialogues. While in Lisbon, I went into the oldest continuous bookstore in the world, Chiado Bertrand Bookstore, which was founded in 1732 (the year of George Washington’s birth). I found this Portuguese published book about Donald Trump that I immediately bought because a redacted title of the book jumped out at me, O Me Too, (which piggybacks nicely on the Me Too movement)). When I got home I was able to also redact “A Pee Poem” (alluding to the Steele dossier about the salacious incident of Trump hiring Russian prostitutes to pee on the bed where the Obamas slept in Moscow). And, as I progressed down the book cover, I was also able to redact Go More Anal and then I placed DJ-45 in front of a golden wall.


Mark Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center as well as the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Scholarship Award for Drama. He is the author of Sacred Misfits (Red Hen Press), Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes from the Underground (Moira Books) and the forthcoming text based art book, Dream Streams (Clare Songbirds Publishing). His video, Widow’s Peek: The Kiss of Death, was selected to the 2018 International Experimental Film Festival in Bilbao, Spain. He is a 2018 Audie Award Finalist for his contribution to the original audio book, Nevertheless We Persisted. Visit his website to learn more about Mark.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

By Gary Laitman

 

Listen, as your friend I feel it is time for us to openly discuss something that’s been bothering me for a while, but it’s a somewhat delicate matter. Please understand I am only bringing this up because I feel that you have been taken advantage of and I do not want you to get hurt any longer. I know this is not what you want to hear, and I promise I am not going to say “I told you so,” but the time has come for you to face facts … he’s just not that into you.

Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand how you fell for him. He promised he was going to be different from all the others, and Lord knows we all wanted that. You’ve been through some tough times in recent years, and it must have felt good to have someone recognize that. He certainly sounded sincere when he spoke and embraced your struggle. It’s not difficult to see why you believed him when he said he wanted nothing more than to stand by your side and help you make a better life together. This makes a lot of sense when you look back on it. But the bottom line is—and you must realize this by now—he was using you. Yes, I’ve said it, he was using you. He did not care and he does not care about you. All along he was using you.

Remember how he railed against the deficit all through the months leading up to the election? You know those tax breaks that he said are going to help bring back jobs and raise our collective incomes? They are going to add $1.5 trillion to the deficit!

Did he tell you that? Did he maybe mention the fact that he and his family are going to receive millions of dollars as a direct result of this new tax law? Maybe it just slipped his mind. Oh, sure, he might have thrown you a few extra bucks in your paycheck, but that’s just like buying your wife a cup a coffee at the local diner while taking your goomah out for a fancy steak dinner.

There’s also the matter of his hotels and country clubs, raking in the dough from people who just want to spend some quality time with him. What a strange coincidence that the fee to join Mar-a-Lago doubled last year. Could he be enriching himself? Not to mention Jared‘s businesses getting half a billion dollars in loans from people with whom he met while in the White House.

Are you starting to see the pattern here? There is no “us” in his “USA.” It is all about him and his family.

I don’t mean to belabor the point, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there were plenty of red flags you chose to ignore. You certainly heard the rumors. We all knew there was something going on with the Russians. No doubt, he had cheated in the past. There was also the constant bragging, not to mention the compulsive lying.

Why were you so willing to overlook this? Did you really think he was going to change his ways for you?

I’m sorry if I sound angry, but this has gone too far, and you deserve better. I don’t care what your other friends say. I’ve heard every excuse in the book including those who justify his behavior by saying he’s a businessman with no government experience.

Really? You and I have been working for more than thirty years: Have you ever seen a successful business run like he and his cronies are running the government? The turnover rate in his administration is worse than a bad year at one of Ivanka’s sweatshops. He hires and fires remarkably unqualified people at an alarming rate, and, quite frankly, the Gambino crime family is more organized than our federal government right now.

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. Again, I want you to know that I value your friendship and I’m only saying these things because I want what’s best for you. So please reassess. Take a fresh look. Open your mind and join the movement to resist his agenda. Also, if you’re done with it, would you mind returning the shovel you borrowed last spring? Thanks.

 


Gary Laitman is an international man of mystery and a proud member of the resistance who has previously written opinion pieces for the Bucks County Courier Times, where this piece previously appeared.

Photo credit: Nicolas Raymond via a Creative Commons license.

Bedtime Stories from Donald Trump

By Deanne Stillman

 

“Who has read The Art of the Deal in this room?” Donald Trump last year at a Liberty University rally. “Everybody. I always say, a deep, deep second to The Bible.”

Long before Trump requested a show of hands, there was someone who proclaimed her admiration for the book in an online forum. This was Laurel Harper, the mother of the Oregon school shooter, the man who shot and killed nine people last October at Umpqua Community College. She had read it to her son, she said, before he was born, as the New York Times reported shortly after the incident last year. “Now my son invests in the stock market along with me,” she said. “[He] turns a profit and is working on a degree in finance. His language and reading skills are phenomenal. I tell you this because it’s not too late for you to start helping your daughter.”

A nurse by profession, Laurel Harper was responding to a parent who had asked for advice about her autistic child. Her own son, Christopher Harper-Mercer, had Asperger’s syndrome and was apparently autistic as well, although Ms. Harper couldn’t have known that while he was in utero; she was talking about the importance of what one reads to unborn children and how that can help them later, as she came to realize, even if they have certain conditions. She didn’t mention other books that she had read aloud at the time; obviously it was something she wanted to pass on in a public conversation board.

For a number of days after the shooting, I couldn’t shake what I had read in the Times. I had heard much about The Art of the Deal from people I’ve written about over the years, many down on their luck, or just plain down for the count—just like their mothers and fathers before them, and the ancient ones who preceded their mothers and fathers on their particular circuit. They were looking for a way in, hoping to hit the jackpot, having been locked out of the American dream long ago. They figured that buying and selling real estate could give them a toehold, and they would say so as they sucked long and hard on their Marlboros, and once that was in motion, it wouldn’t be long before they were making deals with the big guys and even drinking the good stuff, instead of the Jack-and-Cokes they scraped up the coin to pay for during happy hour at the Cactus Lounge. “And then you can come and visit me,” they would say, “but you’ll have to be buzzed in at the gates!” You see, they wanted to live where they weren’t wanted, and they would laugh hard at the statement, knowing that behind it, such a fate was not in their cards, and really, the joke was on them.

Recently, I borrowed The Art of the Deal from the library. I wanted to take another look at the book that some now cite as the blueprint for Donald Trump’s campaign—and which, as was just revealed, has caused remorse for the ghost writer, who came up with the title and much of the framing of Trump’s life. What was in the bestseller, I wondered, that an expectant mother might want to pass on to the next generation? In the book’s own language, Laurel Harper was urging her son to dream a banal world of winners and losers, of striving and acquiring things, of air rights, valuable holdings, and letters of intent. Yet behind that language, she was urging him to make something of himself, hoping, as in a fairy tale—for this is indeed a modern one, stripped of gentility and beauty—that some day, he become a king. As I explored the book, I noted certain passages which might be inspirational for a future investor, and I also started to wonder about the conditions in which Ms. Harper might have read aloud. Was she sitting in a comfortable and favorite armchair, under an oft-used reading light? Did she read to him or actually to herself out loud and therefore her son at the same time, in bed as she drifted off to sleep? Did she read to him on breaks at work, or perhaps during a walk in the park? Here is the scenario I imagined. …

“In college,” she begins, quoting the fellow who flips hotels and once owned a beauty pageant, “while my friends were reading the comics and the sports pages of newspapers, I was reading the listings of FHA foreclosures. … I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form,” she continues as she pages through the book, perhaps giving this a flourish. “Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks. … No matter whom you’ve met over the years,” she adds, whispering possibly or invoking a soothing voice as the unborn boy floated in the primordial tides, “there is something incredible about sitting down to dinner with the cardinal and a half dozen of his top bishops and priests in a private dining room at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. … [The cardinal] is not only a man of great warmth, he’s also a businessman with great political instincts. … Even in elementary school, I was a very assertive, aggressive kid. In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye—I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled. I’m not proud of that, but it’s clear evidence that even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very forceful way. The difference now is that I like to use my brain instead of my fists.” Perhaps she pauses here or stops for the evening, and then picks it up another time, in another place: “I finally found a plane,” she says, maybe with a bit of drama, for indeed, it seems to have been a big moment in Trump’s life. “I happened to be reading an article in Business Week, in the spring of 1987, about a troubled, Texas-based company name Diamond Shamrock. The article described how top Shamrock executives were enjoying incredible perks, actually living like kings. Among the examples cited was a lavishly equipped company-owned 727, which executives flew around in at will.” Flew around in at will, my little one, wouldn’t you like to do that? “There are people—I categorize them as life’s losers—who get their sense of accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others. As far as I’m concerned, if they had any real ability they wouldn’t be fighting me, they’d be doing something constructive themselves.” Now here comes a really good part, I hope you’re paying attention! “I’m not looking to be a bad guy when it isn’t absolutely necessary. … It just goes to show that it pays to move quickly and decisively when the time is right. …” And here’s the best line of all, if you get anything out of this book, young man, I hope this is it. “I’m keeping my options open,” she reads and then she might have said goodnight and sweet dreams to her unborn son, for that is the way of mothers, and then possibly she blew out a candle.

•     •     •

The primordial stew furnishes us with the building blocks of life. This includes not just vitamins and minerals, but, as research shows, things of a more esoteric nature, such as music and art and literature—sounds and vibrations and words that are imprinted onto a seed and from which that seed goes forth and grows and tries to find his or her way in a world filled with obstacles that are seen or felt in the bones. When I first learned about Laurel Harper reading Donald Trump to her son before he was born, I asked some friends about the books or music that they conveyed to their children while in the womb. Several mentioned nursery rhymes, including those that were cautionary tales; writer Samantha Dunn and musician Jimmy Camp spoke of Bob Marley and the song “Three Little Birds,” which their son, now seven, still loves; John Densmore—the drummer in the Doors—sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” to his unborn child, and others played Beatles songs (“My son is now studying music in Liverpool,” photographer Elissa Kline told me).

I know all about the false hope that The Art of the Deal has conveyed to those who have nothing to lose so why not get into real estate? I’ve seen them take one last gamble on some land-buying scam and I’ve seen what happens when it falls apart and they are back at the Cactus Lounge during so-called happy hour. Mostly, they are destroying themselves, perhaps still harboring fantasies of living behind a gate, in a house that they own, free and clear, but knowing in their heart of hearts that such a thing is beyond their reach and the game is over. So they light up another Marlboro and order another Jack-and-Coke; as the old saying goes, the rich get richer and the poor get drunk.

What happens to someone when he soaks up the idea that the world is comprised of winners and losers before he is even born? That losers are people who stand in his way? What happens when this imprinting is later loaded with guns (trips to the shooting range with his mother) and the prospect of fame (numerous shooters who preceded him) along with Asperger’s syndrome, a parade of personal failures and myriad misread cues? After he was born, Christopher Harper-Mercer did indeed follow the urgings of his mother, for she boasted of her son making hay with investments—behold! a king!—and then, somehow, over time it seems, this path could no longer keep him and nor could the many forks he traveled and one day, he went to school and decided to cash in his chips. “I’m a good boy,” he may have thought. “I am moving quickly and decisively when the time is right. I have kept my options open.”

 

Originally published by LitHub as “The Art of Dividing the World into Winners and Losers.”


Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer, and her plays have won prizes in various festivals.  Her books include Desert Reckoning, based on a Rolling Stone piece, winner of the Spur and LA Press Club Awards, an amazon editors’ pick, recipient of rave reviews in Newsweek, the Denver Post, LA Review of Books and elsewhere; Twentynine Palms, an LA Times “best book of the year” that Hunter Thompson called “A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer”; and Mustang, an LA Times “best book of the year,” praised from The Atlantic to The Economist, and recently released in an audio edition with Anjelica Huston, Frances Fisher, Wendie Malick, John Densmore (the drummer in the Doors), and Richard Portnow. In addition, Deanne’s work has appeared in Angels Flight Literary West, Rumpus, Salon, the New York Times, LA Times, Tin House, Orion, Slate and other publications. She also writes the “Letter from the West” column for the Los Angeles Review of Books. She’s a member of the core faculty at the UC Riverside-Low Residency MFA Creative Writing Program and a winner of an Amtrak Writers Residency. For more information, visit her website.

Reading recommendation: Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald J. Trump and Tony Schwartz.

Or the horror and read Deanne’s books, instead.

Desert Reckoning

Mustang