“The
necessity for printing some account in the papers of the young man's career and
personality had led to a remarkable predicament. It was of course impossible to
reveal the facts, for a tremendous popular feeling in favor of the young hero [aviator
Jacky Smurch] had sprung up, like a grass fire, when he was halfway across
Europe on his flight around the globe. He was, therefore, described as a modest
chap, taciturn, blond, popular with his friends, popular with girls. The only
available snapshot of Smurch, taken at the wheel of a phony automobile in a
cheap photo studio at an amusement park, was touched up so that the little
vulgarian looked quite handsome. His twisted leer was smoothed into a pleasant
smile. The truth was, in this way, kept from the youth's ecstatic compatriots;
they did not dream that the Smurch family was despised and feared by its
neighbors in the obscure Iowa town, nor that the hero himself, because of
numerous unsavory exploits, had come to be regarded in Westfield as a nuisance
and a menace. He had, the reporters discovered, once knifed the principal of
his high school -- not mortally, to be sure, but he had knifed him; and on
another occasion, surprised in the act of stealing an altar-cloth from a
church, he had bashed the sacristan over the head with a pot of Easter lilies;
for each of these offences he had served a sentence in the reformatory.”—
American humorist James Thurber (1894-1961), “The Greatest Man in the World,”
in The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935)
This
1931 satire by the New Yorker legend
James Thurber came to my attention
within the last three or four months. Readers at the time would have recognized his young aviator as Charles Lindbergh
pushed to the point of what seemed like absurdity: the clean-cut American hero as a juvenile
delinquent, made palatable for a mass audience by a press corps that should
have known better.
(Lindbergh’s real faults—the anti-semitism that blinded him to the ultimate terror of
Nazism, not to mention the hectoring of wife Anne and secret fathering of
children across the Atlantic with a German woman—would not become apparent at
least until the end of the decade—or, in the case of his surprising
transatlantic paternity, nearly 30 years after his death.)
But
a September 2015 article in The Los Angeles Times by Patt Morrison
put a considerably more contemporary spin on this. She wrote this in the early
GOP primaries in this last, lamentable Presidential cycle, when a “better-class
Jacky Smurch”—matching the aviator in vulgarity and far surpassing him in his
bank account—was emerging: Donald Trump.
What
could the other Republican White House aspirants, like the most powerful men in the nation in Thurber’s story, do to stop
him? Thurber had them rush en masse at Jacky, when the public wasn’t around,
and toss him out the window. The Republican establishment, instead of taking
him head-on when it could have made a difference, chose to believe that The
Donald, most un-aviator-like, would fall of his own weight, and one lucky
fellow among them would be around to pick up his disconsolate followers.
Only
they waited too long—first through the primaries, then the convention, then the
election, and now all the sweet executive-branch appointments to be had. And
now they—and, starting January 20, America as a whole—must face the
consequences.
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