Donald Trump, His Followers and These Times Through the Lens of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby –

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

How many of you have read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic 1925 novel The Great Gatsby and watched one or more versions of the movie adaptations of the story?

This week — holed up in a motel room in an undisclosed location with cable TeeVee after having my life as an American journalist threatened by a right-wing Boogaloo Boy, who literally tried to tell me that I do not have the right to decide what to write and publish under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution — I was surfing channels when I ran across the 2013 version of “The Great Gatsby” movie on HBO staring Leonardo DiCaprio.

While many New York reviewers panned this version, it got me to thinking about the story itself and how it captured those times, what historians ended up calling the “Roaring Twenties.” Moral crusaders in 1919 had managed to ban the legal sale of alcohol across the land, turning half the people of America into criminals overnight with a vote of Congress, a signature by a president, a Constitutional Amendment ratified by the states, and a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Elections matter.

Prohibition may have led to great, secret parties all over the nation, at a time when big money capitalists were raking in a fortune, but it was also a tragic time in American history. Many writers, musicians and well to do Americans fled to France then, even Fitzgerald, his debutante wife Zelda from Montgomery, Alabama, and others like Hemingway.

If Donald Trump somehow manages to steal the upcoming election, pack the Supreme Court with conservatives who finally rule to get rid of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of a pandemic and overturn Roe v. Wade, it is a fantasy for many of us that we would like to leave America and maybe move to Canada or France in these trying times. The problem is, because of Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus, we are trapped. No country will take us. We are the sickest people in the world now, no longer admired by the world but considered pariahs.

You know the numbers by now. They will continue to go up and change the minute I hit the publish button on this story, so I do not feel compelled to report the numbers here, except to point out that more than 200,000 people are dead in this country, many of whom could have been saved if we had simply followed the science and had actual leadership from the White House.

That is not a partisan, subjective opinion. It is matter of objective fact.

While some reviewers were not thrilled with DiCaprio’s performance as Jay Gatsby, Tobey Maguire put in a respectable interpretation of Nick Carraway, the writer who told Gatsby’s story in the book and film. I was struck by one key scene when Carraway tries to save Gatsby from ruin by telling him, “You can’t repeat the past.” But Gatsby insisted that he was wrong. We see in the end how that turned out and who was right.

This is one of the key insights of Fitzgerald’s story, which was not considered particularly great when it was published but later became known as one of the great literary classics in American letters. It managed to capture the spirit of the times and foretell the tragedy of 1929, when the stock market crash brought American capitalism to its knees. It took socialist policies by the FDR administration and a world war to bring America back from the Great Depression.

This is not a past we want to relive. But many people like to romanticize the past based on a fantasy, and a politician like Donald Trump is just corrupt enough to play to the fears and try to fool enough of “the people” into thinking he can bring that past back for them.

In addition to all the other things that make some people worship Trump like a messiah, the cognitive dissonance, the out of the closet racism and the rest, Trump and his brain trust Steve Bannon and others know that older, white Americans — especially those in the working class with no college education — hold a nostalgia for simpler times. The world has become too complicated to deal with in many ways, and the internet and social media make that palpable.

As I travel around and deal with all kinds of Americans this becomes more clear to me all the time. Younger Democrats want to believe that there is hope for the future. Older Republicans want to relive the past.

This shows up in the survey research on those who continue to support this president, clearly the most corrupt public figure we’ve ever seen in this country who is quite willing to sow chaos and confusion to promote his own wealth and power. The problem in 2020 is not Russian or foreign influence on social media and our election system. The threat to democracy is coming from inside the White House.

And from my perspective at least, it seems the “fair and balanced” mainstream news media in this country seems inadequate to the task of framing this story in a way that will reach enough people in time to save us.

Time is running short, so I’m going to save some of my thoughts about this until next week, when I hope to be back on the road and back in the Washington, D.C. area.

But here’s one hint at what will be addressed in Part II: Some of Trump’s most ardent followers are soldiers and police officers who have suffered the trauma of killing other human beings. Those Proud Boys in Portland, Oregon and the proud white cops who raise money through GoFundMe after shooting and killing Africans Americans are scarred humans who seem to want to not only kill other people, but seem to like killing, even though they also claim to live by a religious text that clearly says, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”

This contradictory thought has them confused and anxious, which is incredibly dangerous.

Killing in War Leaves Veterans with Lasting Psychological Scars, Study Finds

Related Coverage: Can a World Awash in Cognitive Dissonance Survive?