아~ 나의 Cold Flu, 감기여, 어제는 목이 안 아프길래 다 난 것처럼 생각했지만 오늘 아침에 일어나니 목소리가 나오지를 않는다. 다만 심하게 아프지만 않을 뿐인데 이것이 정상인가? 만약을 위해서 어제 새로 사온 Theraflu 를 일어나자마자 먹는다. 내일, 모레, 글피 모두 social gathering이 있다는 사실이 계속 신경이 쓰이는데, 어쩔 것인가 기다려 보는 수 밖에.
일어나 바깥 온도계를 보니 17도, 아마도 이것 조차 서서히 하강하는지도 모른다. 바람소리는 예상했던 대로 거의 없는데~ 앞으로 커질 것인가 모르겠다. 연숙이는 지난 밤 꼬박 새웠다고 하니 아마도 오늘 우리 집 아침은 ‘슬플 정도로’ 조용할 듯~~ 제일 따뜻한 옷으로 완전히 bundle-up한 나의 ‘늙은’ 모습이 조금 웃기게 보일 것 같지만, 다행히 나를 연숙이와 Izzie외에는 아무도 보는 사람이 없는 것이 안심이다.
결국은 오늘도 sick day로 보낸 하루가 되었다. 눕고 싶은 정도는 아니지만 앉아 있기에는 조금 불편한 것, 기침도 계속 나는 것이 손쉽게 이 감기가 끝날 것 같지 않다. 한마디로 나는 현재 아주 정상이 아닌 것이다. 무슨 zombie처럼 된 느낌으로 한가지에 집중도 못하며 이것 저것 Youtube를 방황하는 하루가 되었다.
날씨는 예보된 것처럼 그렇게 무서운 것은 아니었다. 물론 바깥으로 나가지를 않아서 그렇게 보인 것일지도 모르지만… 기온은 역시 20도를 못 넘기는데 오늘 밤부터는 아예 single digit로 계속 이어진다니 사실 이것은 10년 만의 추위가 될 듯하다.
하도 감기약을 계속 먹어서 그런지 책을 읽는 것은 엄두도 못 냈지만 대신 screen reading은 문제가 없어서 거의 하루 종일 날씨 뉴스와 DONALD ‘개XX’ 에게는 bad news가 되는 것들을 보며 유일한 즐거움으로 삼았다. 남의 불행을 이렇게 나의 행복으로 여긴 것, 그렇게 흔한 일이 아닌데… 이것은 예외다. 오늘의 ‘청문회 보고’에서 그 놈이 모든 사태의 유일한 주범임을 선언을 한 것, 어느 정도의 위력을 가진 것인지 그것이 궁금하기만 하다. 이것이 과연 그 놈의 마지막 과정의 시작이 될 것인가, 바로 그것이 문제다.
그제 잠깐 보았던 NYT ‘흑인’ Charles M. Blow의 DONALD ‘개XX’에 대한 column을 읽으며 역시 나의 생각이 보편적 상식적인 것이었구나 하며 안심을 넘어 쾌재를 불렀다. 자세한 사실들 을 떠나서 이 논평의 중심논리는 나와 거의 일치하는 것이었다. 이것으로 다시 한번 ‘정의는 승리한다’ 라는 말을 재확인하는 2022년 송년을 맞는다.
GODS DON’T BLEED. TRUMP IS BLEEDING
December 21, 2022
Charles M. Blow
New York Times Opinion Columnist
I wrote in 2019 that Donald Trump ascended to folk hero status among the people who liked him, which meant that his lying, corruption, sexism and grift not only did not damage him, they added to his legend.
The folk hero is transcendent. He defies convention and defies gravity — in Trump’s case, political and cultural gravity. He overcomes the impossible, wins the improbable, evades authority.
He was a classic trickster figure, common in folklore.
For instance, for a Black child growing up in the American South, Stack-O-Lee (or, among other variations, Stagger Lee, as we pronounced it) was a folk hero. “Stack” Lee Shelton was a Black man, a pimp, who in 1895 shot another man dead for snatching his hat. The story became the subject of so-called murder ballads. Shelton bolstered his legend when, after being released from prison, he killed another man during a robbery.
This man, this figure, who negotiated the space between slavery and freedom, between criminal and hero, “came to personify the collective feeling of blacks at the bottom of society, and it was in this sense that Stagolee became a symbol of the Black community,” as Cecil Brown wrote in his book “Stagolee Shot Billy.”
Writing in Mother Jones in 2011, Joe Kloc described how Stack-O-Lee became a hero in Southern Black society by unapologetically breaking its rules. The murders he committed “only serve to illustrate the injustices of southern society,” Kloc wrote. “For all the myth surrounding him, there is something very rational about Stack-O-Lee’s character: Why follow some of society’s rules when so many others work against you?”
This is why I so instinctively understood Trump’s appeal and heroizing.
Years, decades, of twisted propaganda had turned working-class white people into a victimized class. These white people saw themselves as the new Negro, in a turned-tables alternate reality. Society’s rules threatened to — or, had already begun to — work against them.
Trump, the trickster and rule-breaker, emerges as an amalgamation of their anxieties and rebellion. He was a politician, but to them, above politics. The Donald was approaching deity. His followers embraced a cultish zealotry.
But things have changed.
Trump’s announcement of a third run for the White House landed with a thud. High-profile Republicans have refused to sign on as early endorsers. Trump himself is cloistered at Mar-a-Lago, having not held a single public campaign event since his announcement. In fact, he has been reduced to the low and laughable position of personally hawking digital trading cards of himself. (Trump has always seen his die-hard supporters as customers to whom he could sell a product, whether a candidacy or a card.)
And a recent poll showed that Republican and Republican-leaning voters, at least at this point, prefer Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to Trump by double digits.
So, what happened? In short, God bled. And once you see God bleed, you can no longer believe that someone is God.
It is impossible to overstate how damaging the results of the midterms were, not just to Republicans, but to Trump himself.
For years, Trump had been able to blame losses or defeats on other people, or even recast them as victories.
Even though the Robert Mueller report was damning in many ways and went out of its way not to exonerate Trump, the fact that no charges were brought against Trump left him with the opening to claim total vindication.
He wasn’t disgraced as much as a victim of a politically motivated plot. Impeachment, he told his supporters, driven by my political enemies, had twice failed to remove me. He wasn’t the most flawed president, but the most resilient.
When Trump lost in 2020, he blamed corruption and a stolen election. That, of course, was another lie. According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history,” and “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Nevertheless, Republican state legislatures across the country used Trump’s election fraud lie as a rationale to “fix” election systems that weren’t broken, to implement even more oppressive voting restrictions.
But there was an unintended consequence: By boasting about making their electoral processes more secure, Republicans took away whatever latitude they had to lie about elections being stolen when they lost.
And, in the midterms, they lost some major races, including in states that had implemented the most regressive voter laws, like Georgia and Arizona, where Democrats handily dispatched Trump’s anointed candidates. There was no way to wiggle out of the devastating truth of the cycle: The Trump brand was too tarnished and toxic to win in many battleground states. He was no longer able to defy political gravity.
At the same time, Trump’s legal losses are mounting as multiple investigations close in on him. The man many had compared to Teflon is beginning to appear more like fly paper.
Where some Republicans once saw invincibility, they now sense weakness and injury. And in the pack mentality of politics, this is the moment that they are most likely to turn on him.