Into the cornfield
There’s a particularly chilling episode of the old Twilight Zone TV series called “It’s a Good Life,” a Rod Serling teleplay of a Jerome Bixby short story. It goes like this: A monster lives in a small Ohio village. He is an ordinary-appearing six year old boy named Anthony with extraordinary abilities. His every whim has absolute power. Anthony has caused everyone in the United States to “go away” because they displease him. Everyone else still alive in the village must be nice to him or he will “send them into the cornfield,” a euphemism for making them disappear. Anthony can read everyone’s thoughts, so everyone must always be thinking exaggeratedly happy thoughts.
The story is a metaphor for a very real existential question that was new to the world when it was first broadcast. What do we do when a madman, a child, a person of no conscience and complete indifference to human suffering, gains total control of the world? How do we behave? How do we keep him from sending us into the cornfield?
Those are questions that are relevant to Americans and citizens of the world today. For the second time in human history, a vindictive monster with hypersensitive feelings is about to be handed the nuclear codes of the most powerful nation on earth, the only true superpower. This monster isn’t a six year old boy, he’s a stupid, vindictive, hateful old man who will enter his 80th year in six months. The existential question we have is, how is America and the rest of the world supposed to behave? What is going to happen to any one of us if we incur his capricious and arbitrary and easily-triggered wrath?
We are about to learn the answer. Filled with hubris and stupidity, Donald Trump’s recent campaign of sabre-rattling at America’s allies has elicited some expected responses. While appeasing and flattering and accommodating America’s enemies, the man who ran on a promise of no more wars suddenly wants war with Mexico, Canada, Greenland (and its possessor Denmark) and Panama. So far those nations will have none of it. But what harm will America’s “Anthony” do to them for their failure to kowtow to him? Will he send them into the cornfield? If so, what form will that take?
Canada’s soon-to-exit prime minister Pierre Trudeau says there’s not a “snowball’s chance in hell” that his country will join America as its fifty-first state. Denmark avers that Greenland is once again not for sale. In response to Trump’s claim that the Gulf of Mexico should be rebranded the “Gulf of America,” Claudia Sheinbaum, the forthright president of Mexico, jokingly suggested that the US territory that was once part of Mexico should be renamed “Mexican America.”
But all joking aside, there could be real world consequences for defying Trump. We already know that the harm he promises to inflict on others is more than theoretical. In his criminal mishandling of the Covid pandemic, Trump withheld PPEs and breathalysers from blue states. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria Trump denied millions of dollars of aid to Puerto Rico simply because he disliked the mayor of San Juan and because many of the people of the country were brown. Trump deprived his former fixer Michael Cohen of his Constitutional rights and locked him away in the cornfield of solitary confinement merely because he planned to write a book.
This time around, with no voices of sanity to restrain him and no law to answer to, what harm will Trump inflict and on whom? Who is he going to hurt? What lives will he ruin, merely because he can’t handle an insult? Who or what nations will get thrown into the proverbial cornfield? We’ll learn the answer soon enough.
It’s not the job of the president of the United States to hurt people. It’s his sworn duty to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” by faithfully executing his office. Donald Trump has already announced that he plans to fail at his job. He prefers to hurt people instead.
Of course, a man who is constitutionally disallowed from taking office is by definition disqualified from preserving, protecting or defending that Constitution. But a man as hateful and vindictive as Trump can and will do a lot of damage to a lot of people. MAGA is about to find out that damage will extend to many of them. I hope he throws the whole bloody lot of them into the goddamn cornfield.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.