Why We're In Deep Shit

A modern rendering. Medieval painters didn’t dare draw this historical event, considered so disgusting and undignified that it would have insulted God.

Nothing is quite so valuable to a writer as an apt metaphor. Finding an apt metaphor is the smart person’s version of finding the perfect emoji.

Today, in searching through world history, I found the most apt metaphor for the Trump regime and its ongoing global malfeasance. It dates back to the events of July 26, 1184, the day that things, as they say in the movies, got medieval.

On that day, a group 80 or 90 noblemen met in the German city of Erfurt to resolve a local political dispute between rival landowners. The meeting was presided over by King Henry VI of Germany, under the direction of his father, Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor. Henry was then a lad of 18. He was said to be ruthless, though he looked like this, according to a tapestry:

The noblemen convened, along with clergy, in a large meeting chamber on the top floor of an old stone monastery. There were a LOT of guys in that room, and as it happens, the floor was undergirded by rotting weight-bearing joists. The floor collapsed, and through the vast, gaping hole plummeted as many as 70 people. They thudded onto the floor below, which also caved in, flinging all of these people into the commodious, juicy latrine pit in the basement.

Yes, the official name of this event is the “Erfurt Latrine Disaster.” Plumbing was primitive, back in feudal days. You pooped and peed into a chamber pot which you emptied into a hole in the floor, which emptied into a stone-lined pit that had likely not been serviced for years, on the very medieval scientific theory that if something is underground, it goes away.

The luckiest people who fell through the floorboards were the ones whose heads were instantly crushed against stone. The unluckiest were those who remained alive to drown or suffocate in the stench of that loathsome place. Theories are that the stuff in the cesspool was too high for the grievously injured to climb out of.

Some sixty people died. Henry survived. He and an archbishop had been engaged in conversation while perching on a stone window alcove. They clung to it for an hour, until the ladders arrived.

Okay, now for Donald Trump.

The latrine disaster was, literally and figuratively, a systems failure produced by a toxic political culture. In that case, the culture was the flagrantly lawless and elitist medieval European world — a world of nested hierarchies of personality cults. Literally, kings were said to have been endowed with their power by God. Lords were empowered by kings. The whole system was corrupt to its core: inherited status, fealty tests, tributes paid by the wealthy to their leaders. The system’s political infrastructure was not sound — it was rotted from within, and one day it took all those people of illegitimate, unearned, noble status and drowned them in shit.

All the grandees had assumed the institution underneath them was sturdier than it was. But it had no structural integrity.

Sound familiar? In well-functioning democratic governments of today, cults of personality theoretically do not exist. Institutions should matter more than individuals. The rule of law should transcends personalities. Not so with the Trump regime, an enormous, corrupt, toxic cult of personality. In this cult, competence is almost immaterial, secondary to pliability. Ideological consistency is almost immaterial, secondary to obedience. Donald Trump has surrounded himself with unqualified spineless kooks and crooks and weasels who do what they are told. Fealty tests abound. The corruption is so institutionalized, we are numb to it.

Plainly, no one in Donald Trump’s orbit dares to counsel this man, let alone stop him. When he went to war with Iran, he did it because he wanted to, period.

And that’s why we’re in deep shit.

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