METAMORPHOSIS

It isn’t the departure from norms and the normative that chill the soul in this Trumpolithic Epoch. It’s the exposure of the now-glaring fact that norms and the normative were and always are chimerical, just cherished illusions, gossamer distorters. These years have been a gradual awakening, not to our own metamorphosis into cockroaches, but to the transformation of so many much like ourselves into the giant insects. So many and so fast that we know there’s not only a possibility we’ll undergo the same makeover but the distinct likelihood of it. Everyone’s mirror has faint outlines of antennae and exoskeleton dancing around the face’s image, of spasming forelegs jerking about the head.

It’s not a new phenomenon. The God of the Old Testament found us, his special creations, so distasteful and disappointing that He felt obliged to wash us away by Chapter Six (just fourteen pages into a nearly-two-thousand-page version of the Bible). His second generation proved little if any better, so we’ve lived since with the stigma of being rightly damned but for God’s kindly indulgence. We’ve always hung by a thread, one wispy string of the gossamer distorter that allows us to feel salvageable or vaguely worthwhile.

It’s not a new phenomenon, but each of us comes into the world oblivious to his own and our collective baseness, and each has to learn it for himself. We’re born cockroach-cousins disguised as people who wear nice outfits, eat with proper utensils, and sometimes even play the piano.

So it’s still jarring for each person to become aware of her inner cockroach. In a rare moment of compassion, God gave us all a defensive inability to see clearly the cockroachness in ourselves, while also gifting us with a preternatural capacity to detect it in others. In each successive primitive age, there are periods of heightened sensitivity to our own insect nature. The Trumpolithic Epoch is such a time, the millionth iteration.

There’s comfort in the realization it isn’t new, that it’s as old as human history. But it still startles and dismays each person anew as she undergoes it, much like learning the cruel truth about Santa. It leaves a wistful pall on all Christmases ever after. It’s a trauma from which we never fully recover.

We approach a new year, the ninth one since the Trumpolithic Epoch descended on us like an overwarm ice age. The appearance of so many cockroaches in so short a time is not as striking as the paucity of those willing or able to say bluntly, “Now I’m one” or “There’s yet another.” In fact, the Trumpolithic Epoch is all the more chilling for the pervasive refusal to acknowledge that the kitchen floor is virtually black with scurrying, hard-shelled little monsters every time the light’s turned on.

What’s at work here? It is likely kinship, cockroach-cousinship, that carries both a sense of fellow-feeling and a sense of fellow-fearing. No one wants to be too forward or obvious about calling for the exterminator. It’s fraught with danger. Whoever or whatever appears to carry out the eradication program must be given leave to determine what is and what isn’t insect. We’ve all seen, at the least, the dim aura of cockroachness in our own mirrors. Some of us may have seen the frank little beast itself. Some of us know we’ve left uncovered and abundant food for the things for years, even if we assure ourselves that our own mirrors reflect mostly human forms.

Extermination poses a risk to us all, then. Even those fairly confident their mirror images remain untainted by insect-like aura legitimately fear both cockroaches and exterminator. The bug breed may have already reached critical mass, able to overpower any method or means available to the exterminator. Or the exterminator may be a trickster, himself a cockroach posing as cockroach nemesis, intent on eliminating humans. Or, in spite of our own confidence in being as-yet untransformed, we sense tomorrow morning could be our Gregor Samsa day.

These are all legitimate concerns. We sense that those scuttling about the kitchen floor were shocked, horrified, to see it happen to themselves. We sense, fear even, they must know they’ve metamorphosed, despite their continuing loud denials. They must know, just as we know the seed of insectness is likely germinating within us.

We imagine the horror of their experience, feel their hardened isolation from fleshy form. So many fine people raised in nice houses by upright, even God-devoted parents, schooled well and expensively through universities and often to advanced degrees, well-dressed, well-spoken, and well-mannered. People who excelled, stood out, distinguished themselves time and again in multiple and varied pursuits, got selected to lead, read good books and understood them, hummed opera arias, played violin. People with understanding and education to know full-well what the Constitution was trying to establish despite its clumsy shortcomings. People who were genuinely appalled by the mob on January 6, disgusted, outraged, heart-sickened. Even more disgusted, outraged, and appalled (briefly) by their banner carrier who suited their purposes until then.

To all appearances, people of the highest order. Better than most, brighter than most, enough to make a plausible claim they were. They had watched in alarm as their fine shoes were first soiled by the shallow shadow of effluent on the White House floor, had felt some revulsion when the brown, viscous excrescence topped their shoes and reached tailored pants or skirts, had felt alarm and revulsion grow to horror as the effulgence reached the thighs. Now maybe they sense that the stinking putrescence is not at their chests but at their shelly thoraces.

Much as we may despise, say, a Mike Pence, much as we might think “a” Mike Pence is an appropriate way to convey his thingness, it’s hard not to feel some empathy toward him. He and family members nearly killed at the primitive urging of his boss, yet still unable to speak and act plainly and unambiguously on behalf of decency. He, likely still nursing some illusion of nearness to the Divine, yet wondering how divine got so profane. He, likely furious, enraged at the remorseless boss, but fundamentally unable to meet the boss’s mean madness head-on. We think he must know the bottomlessness of his cravenness, must feel his reduction to not only diminished human stature but to low ranking among the insects. Despised by all.

There are so many of them. Mike Pence stands out for the sputtering ineffectuality even of his muted outrage. So many others have lost the capacity even to feign outrage. We see them as lost, estranged, irretrievable. We see them likely aware of their hopelessness, at least hope they feel hopeless. We sense they find comfort only in their insect cohesiveness.

But what does an Elise Stefanik see in the mirror? A person we see as smart, young, meteoric in ascendancy, soulless. Still unequivocally cheerleading for her benefactor. Almost certainly she sees antennae, compound eyes, wings, segmented abdomen, hindlegs, forelegs. Or does she still see Harvard-promise and -purpose, see herself as coming dominatrix in the next epoch?

That may be the most chilling piece of the Trumpolithic Epoch. There may be Gregor Samsas who awake as cockroach but whose now-compound eyes still see only an intact human form and likeness. See man or woman made in God’s image. Maybe there’s a capacity like that inborn obliviousness we all have until it’s shattered by learning the truth about Santa. Maybe a similar capacity returns, like scales over compound eyes, to make the fully-insected appear fully human to themselves.

If so, Gregor Samsa was lucky to perceive what had happened to him, ironically blessed with awareness of having become alien to all he thought he was. All of us in the Trumpolithic Epoch who are as yet untransformed are blessed to sense the imminence of our own conversion to cockroach. The foreboding is the clearest proof it hasn’t happened yet, and a tepid assurance it might not happen at all.

Written December 28, 2022
©2022 Lawrence Helms