The Kingdom of the Absurd

“I do believe I will be having the honor of taking Cuba. . . . I think I can do anything I want with it.”

- Donald Trump

It’s a little after eleven on Tuesday morning, April 7th, fewer than nine hours before a man with an unquenchable ego, a penchant for cruelty, and the darkest vision for America in the history of the presidency, has threatened to “obliterate” Iran. The sky is blue here this morning, and the sun shines warmly through intermittent clouds. Spring finally seems on the way to midcoast Maine – but snow is forecast for this afternoon. The vice-president is in Hungary seeking to prop up its long-time dictator who is trailing badly in the polls, and the secretary for war (let’s call him what he is) has likened Sunday’s rescue of a US pilot shot down over Iran to the resurrection.

My mind has been going through a fallow period these past weeks. Since I was unable to produce much of interest even to myself, I decided to seek out the thoughts of others, which is how I ended up rereading, after many years, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in which Albert Camus sets forth his philosophy of the absurd.

I won’t bore you with my pedestrian efforts to grasp the concept, but at its core is Camus’ search to understand the struggle of human beings to find meaning in a universe that is morally indifferent. “This world in itself is not reasonable,” he wrote. “But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational [universe] and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.”

Camus was born into a poor family in the French colony of Algeria and spent most of World War II in France, where he was an active member of the resistance. “The Myth of Sisyphus” was published in 1942. World War II was once called “the good war,” but by the time it ended in 1945, 80 million people were dead, the vast majority of them non-combatants. Almost three-quarters of all the Jews living in Nazi-occupied Europe were murdered; in Poland and Yugoslavia the number approached 90 percent. With numbers that size, and with propaganda from all sides bent on dehumanizing the enemy, it is hard to think of each of the dead as a unique individual with a family and a personal history. They are, collectively, victims. Those in unending rows of white crosses are heroes. The others are collateral damage. In the grand scheme of the war their lives made little difference; yet each was precious each irreplaceable.

At 8:06 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the president of the United States wrote: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” adding somewhat gratuitously, “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” What he’s suggesting, of course, is a crime against humanity, the kind the world sought to outlaw after World War II.

That evening Trump announced a two-week cease fire. Some called this an example of strategic genius; most of us just felt whipsawed. Meanwhile, both sides claimed victory; their interpretation of the terms diverged widely; the Israelis kept bombing Lebanon; and the Secretary for War called the man who the day before had called for the obliteration of an entire nation a “president of peace.”

Americans have long believed that our institutions would protect us from a dictator. And yet here we are, the world’s oldest republic ruled by a man who mistakes himself for the state and treats the people, not as citizens, but as subjects.

Welcome to the Kingdom of the Absurd.