Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
Pygmalion and the Image - The Soul Attains
(1878)

"Pray for the retinue."

He rambles when he speaks, just as if he cannot help himself. He doesn’t seem capable of sticking to any topic, though he does tend to swerve back to some chief irrelevance, depending upon what he might be obsessing about at that particular moment that week. Very little of whatever he says seems terribly focused. He calls a press conference as if only to berate the dutifully assembled press, sometimes insisting that all reporters leave the room before he begins, to punish them for some imagined infraction, I guess. He often appears to doze, though, admittedly, that might just be some sort of negotiating ploy, if only he had been negotiating anything in those instances. He wasn’t. He moves like a drunk through the world, coming very close to bouncing off things he passes, bullshit wending through a china shop. He pretends a lot, though it might be that he believes everything he says. If so, he’s a Madman. Of this, little doubt remains.

He will not be talked out of his irrational convictions. If only they were only irrational, for they map to no known logical or illogical structure, nor do they appear to be completely random. Enough of a tattered plotline persists to convince many that he’s just being canny, pretending to be crazy to confuse and confound his ever-increasingly many enemies. To a few, he remains a marvelous strategic thinker, arriving at conclusions none of his contemporaries imagined possible, for they do often appear unimaginable. He blythely misquotes his dismal economic record, for he has belly-flopped each new initiative. The tariffs were never evidence of genius, and they produced almost precisely the opposite of what he promised they would deliver. His Big Tough Guy stances have left him appearing to be the biggest wussie on the planet, while he self-publishes comix that cast him as the sole superhero president. He makes up criteria that make his performance rate better than any incumbent in history, with the possible exception of Nero, yielding a superhero exclusively in his own clouded mind.

I suppose his staff understands how dire his administration’s actual condition must be. They must sense some semblance of reality. In the past, when an incumbent became disabled, staff circled around to protect the position, if not necessarily the person inhabiting it. Job Number One becomes protecting not the incumbent, but the public from realizing that, at that moment, nobody’s driving, a notion apparently so horrifying that to not fall in line must seem treasonous, though leaking this information might prove to be the most patriotic action imaginable. Madmen often find themselves surrounded by loyalists who’ve also lost their minds, conflating duty with maintaining appearances of the familiar status quo. The incumbent’s reputation replaces actual performance. Ours might negotiate a little worse than a Raggedy Andy doll, but his staff touts him as the master negotiator he originally claimed he was, though never with much in the way of physical evidence. His myth preserveth. The Chief Executive becomes a wholly fictional presence where words and music virtually never match, but nobody seems ready to admit as much.

The Emperor was always naked. He never once ever appeared in public clothed in anything more substantial than spin. According to him, he wore only the finest raiment. He could never have become Emperor without succeeding in projecting this sole superpower. Call it public relations, advertising, or, simply, lying, but the men on that flying trapeze were never normal. No normal human would ever consent to performing so high up there without a net. The job violates the normal human’s self-preservation clause. Not all who wear that leotard qualify as crazy, though. Some seem sane, even given their job’s extreme context. One in a few might well be certifiable, but with their context so absolutely crazy to begin with, I suspect that people come prepared to tolerate more crazy when witnessing anybody performing in such a fundamentally crazy context. Few, if any, presidents’ actions could ever be properly characterized as normal, anyway.

Throughout history, civilizations have steadfastly believed in what might be referred to as The Great Man Theory of governance, a popular and perhaps necessary myth. Back in the early Middle Ages, some idiot son of a genuinely brilliant king might gain power through succession. The prince inheriting the position might have been the least capable person in the whole kingdom to fulfill the role of king, but it couldn’t do to have an idiot king when a king needed to be wise, and so they were. Through studied practice, the king’s retinue learned to interpret whatever directions the king might give in ways that wouldn’t ultimately undermine the king’s authority, as idiot and even brilliant kings were sometimes prone to do. The watchwords were: The King Is Wise. Remembering to interpret all kingly commands as if that king were wise requires a disciplined mind. Nobody who merely executes commands could hope to succeed for long. Nor could those not clever enough to convince the king, however idiotic or brilliant, that they had, indeed, commanded whatever brilliant result ultimately came about, long succeed. In this way, it rarely mattered whether a king was an idiot, or brilliant, or a Madman like the one we’re blessed with today. Pray for the retinue. If they cannot successfully reinterpret our Madman’s commands, we’re screwed.

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