{"id":16824,"date":"2024-09-19T10:45:19","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T09:45:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=16824"},"modified":"2024-09-19T10:45:19","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T09:45:19","slug":"review-trump-rant-by-chris-agee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2024\/09\/19\/review-trump-rant-by-chris-agee\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Trump Rant by Chris Agee"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cTrump Inhabits Trumpistan\u201d, writes Chris Agee in his rampaging poetic satire, Trump Rant<\/em>: \u201cTrump Is the Wolf of Washington\u201d. Written over a four-year period from 2017 onwards, and arranged as an expanding series of mock-newspaper headlines, Agee\u2019s book begins as an act of stinging personal portraiture and ends as a thorough-going investigation of America itself \u2013 which appears, over the course of the poem, as both an empire in decline and a dysfunctional democracy in crisis. \u201cTrumpian Fever\u201d, Agee writes, \u201cContinually Reminds Me of the Civil War Build-up of the 1850s\u201d. As Agee recognises, and as Mark Twain likewise knew, the past and present have a habit of rhyming through the flux.<\/span><\/p>\n

A US-born Irish citizen, based in Belfast, Agee is singularly sensitive to the totalitarian impulses and tribal resentments that the title-figure \u2013 a \u201cBeacon of Malevolence\u201d \u2013 has proven adept at mobilising, both in and out of political office. \u201cTrump Is Ten Times Worse Than Nixon\u201d, he insists, reminding us that the current Republican nominee for president \u201cOpenly Supported the Kenosha Shooter\u201d, Kyle Rittenhouse, in 2020. Such precedents alter the civic atmosphere, toxifying public politics, possibly beyond repair.<\/p>\n

The Trumpian era, Agee suggests, is defined by ruthlessness, for \u201cTrump\u201d at heart \u201cIs a Political Cutthroat\u201d: a charismatic leader with brash demogogic tendencies, brazenly echoing white nationalist discourses in his bloated ascent to political power. \u201cTrump Is Malcolm X\u2019s \u201cAmerican Nightmare\u201d\u201d, we\u2019re informed: a proposition that feels at once historically grounded and chillingly prophetic.<\/p>\n

In this respect, the Rant<\/em> may bear a resemblance to the work of Allen Ginsberg, combining oratorical force with a deep-running sense of cultural urgency. \u201cTrump Is the Real Plot Against America\u201d, Agee declares, \u201cTrump Is a Mouth Who Loves Mouthing\u201d. It should be said that part of the appeal of Trump Rant<\/em> \u2013 what stops it from being merely abrasive and makes it, instead, thought-provoking and often funny \u2013 is its fizzing sense of how ludicrous Trump can be. It\u2019s possible, indeed, that when faced with the former president\u2019s one-man circus-show, laughter may be the sanest response. \u201cTrump Is Impossible To Imagine as a Scuba-diver\u201d, Agee quips, and any honest observer would struggle to disagree.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump Speaks No Languages (Not Even English)\u201d, he continues, and we begin to understand the complex blend of fixation and anger that propels Trump Rant <\/em>along its hurricane-course. Whereas Trump wields language like an ugly weapon, scattering falsehoods and distortions whenever he speaks, Agee, a poet, is using his words to hold up an accusing mirror to power itself. \u201cTrump\u201d, he suggests, \u201cIs The Corrupted Dream\u201d. The Rant<\/em>, by contrast, might be thought of as a visceral attempt to re-galvanise the original promise \u2013 of language as a mode of truthful speech, and of the United States as a vibrant democratic republic (or what Langston Hughes<\/span><\/a> called, with painful justice, the \u201cland that never has been yet\u201d).<\/p>\n

With his Democratic rivals staunchly committed to neoliberalism<\/a><\/span> at home and genocide<\/a><\/span> abroad, and his own party plunging ever deeper into a sludge-pit of weaponised nativism, toxic conspiracy culture and personality-worship, as a political figure Trump in 2024 seems as peculiarly emblematic as he has ever been: both homegrown product and representative man, incarnating the feral aggression and strange emptiness of American capitalism. \u201cTrump Is a Tacky Gatsby Bamboozling the National Nick (We\u2019ve Read It All Before!)\u201d, Agee writes, and the tarnished nature of America\u2019s self-mythology seems all the more polluting; the rot too rampant to be reversed.<\/p>\n

For all its declarative zest and referential range, Agee\u2019s book is saturated with political dread: we read it in the shadow of things to come.<\/p>\n

Feature Image by DonkeyHotey – Donald Trump – Caricature, CC BY-SA 2.0, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=66578850<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTrump Inhabits Trumpistan\u201d, writes Chris Agee in his rampaging poetic satire, Trump Rant: \u201cTrump Is the Wolf of Washington\u201d. Written over a four-year period from 2017 onwards, and arranged as an expanding series of mock-newspaper headlines, Agee\u2019s book begins as an act of stinging personal portraiture and ends as a thorough-going investigation of America itself […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":246,"featured_media":16849,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,19],"tags":[335,1619,1620,1621,1688,1690,1693,1695,2104,2589,3392,7634,7807,8500,9555,9559,9560],"class_list":["post-16824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-society-culture","tag-agee","tag-chris","tag-chris-agee","tag-chris-agee-trump-rant","tag-ciaran-orourke-cassandra-voices","tag-ciaran-orourke-poet","tag-ciaran-orourke-writer","tag-ciaran-orourke","tag-culture","tag-donald-trump-political-style","tag-food","tag-rant","tag-review","tag-society","tag-trump","tag-trump-inhabits-trumpistan","tag-trump-rant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/246"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}