Did you ever wonder who is living in the house where you spent the first couple of decades of your life? Occasionally we get the chance to drive by a former home. Always a little eerie? No? I once looked at my childhood home over Google Maps. Looking at the color of the house, the yard, and the surrounding homes on the street, it soon became obvious that my former home did not exist. Inside our heads, they do exist, of course. But who is walking those halls now? What kids are spending a sleepless Christmas eve now? Are all the fruit trees my family planted gone? What about the Chinese Elm that my grandfather planted in that backyard? I can't even imagine what our garage looks like. Oh yeah, it's no longer our garage.
There is a line regarding Arthur Miller's masterpiece, "Death of a Salesman" where Miller, in a preface to the play looks at the home of the Loman family with hindsight. He says something like look at that home now, it's still there, but "the wrong people are in the halls." That line has been tugging at me as I watch the attempted coup taking place in this country by a thoroughly corrupt President. The wrong people are in the halls of power.
What Donald Trump once referred to as "all the best people" turned out to be just the opposite. This is often the case with him. He had the worst possible picks to head the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education, and so on and so on. If he had tried to appoint the worst possible people for various federal jobs, he could not have done any better. Trump projects. He's consistent on that. What he says and does is actually the opposite of the truth. It's the, "It's not me, it's you" behavior that psychologists call the defense mechanism of PROJECTION. It's the screaming man shouting at the top of his lungs, "Excited, I'm not excited, you're excited." We've all been on both ends of this behavior.
So now it is 2021 and there really is a new kid on the block. He's not a kid and the block has only one house, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But the halls will have new people walking around.
As I write this, a new recording has just surfaced of the outgoing President doing another imitation of a mafioso Don. He's verbally twisting the arm of an election official, repeating lies, and threatening this Secretary of the state of Georgia to "find" some more votes because "we won the election, and it's not fair for them to take it away like this." Outrageous yes, but more than that, sociopathology in the raw.
Late in Miller's Salesman during Willy Loman's funeral, as part of the requiem, Biff Loman, one of Willy's sons says, "He had the wrong dreams, wrong, all, all wrong." It's an epiphany for Biff, but the other son Happy disagrees and retaliates, "It's the only dream you can have, to come out number one." But at what cost. The dreams, like the people walking the halls were always all wrong. All wrong.
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