8 minutes reading time
The air conditioning in the office was set to meat-locker temperatures, and every third cubicle monkey with a lanyard was holding a paper cup of machine tea and having a moral seizure over Donald Trump. I don't mind the cold AC, but it's very rare to have it cool here. Usually they keep it running low (I mean low load on AC and thus high temp), at least that's what IBM does on this call centre floor. I have seen some other offices have good AC running most of the time when I happen to pass by there. Anyway, going back to what people are talking about: "How can Americans vote for such a vulgar man?" they asked, genuine horror trembling in their clean-shaven IT jaws. These were the exact same cunts who marched down to the polling booths two years earlier to vote for Narendra Modi, grinning ear to ear like they had personally saved the nation. Modi is running the country like an authoritarian landlord, but because Trump spoke like a crude carnival hustler on American television, my coworkers looked down their noses from their little four-lakh-a-year cubicles, utterly baffled by the barbarians across the Atlantic.
It was a curious sort of hypocrisy, the kind one observes among respectable clerks who have traded their village dust for corporate badges and a taste of instant coffee. They sat together at the laminate tables, carefully brushing biscuit crumbs from their trousers, speaking of American elections as though they were arbiters of high virtue. To them, a ruler's decency was measured entirely by his tone at a lectern. A man who spoke quietly and wore a well-fitted wool coat could starve a weaver's hearth or sign away an orphan's relief, and they would call it prudent administration. But let a loud, coarse fellow bluster in the marketplace, and their moral sensibilities were wounded beyond repair. They could forgive any amount of quiet ruin so long as the paperwork remained tidy and the grammar was beyond reproach.
lol I tried to write that like Gaskell. Let me try different things.
What kind of manhood is that, I ask you? (Sounds like something Jayakanthan would shout across a tea stall, but it's true.) You sit in an air-conditioned room built on American client money, eating greasy samosas, and pretend you have clean hands. When a poor man on the pavement throws a stone, you call him a rowdy. When a prime minister or a president drops a bomb with the stroke of an imported fountain pen, you call it governance. Look at them. They look at Trump and see a monster because his vulgarity is naked, walking the bazaar without a loincloth. But Obama? Ah, Obama has a degree from Harvard. He smiles with white teeth, he pauses with great dignity, and the middle-class intellectual falls on his knees, kissing the foot that presses his neck into the dirt. A polished butcher is still a butcher, brother, even if he carries a silk handkerchief to wipe the blood off his fingers.
Now, if you ask the average educated gentleman to pick his poison, he will invariably choose the thief who quotes Shakespeare over the horse-thief who simply kicks down the stable door. That was the whole swindle of the summer. The Democratic party elders had finished running Bernie Sanders through the corporate threshing machine, neatly sweeping his scruffy volunteers into the gutter so Hillary Clinton could have her royal parade. Hillary was the sort of candidate who made you feel like you were being lectured by a pious schoolmistress while her husband quietly sold your family cow out the back door. Nobody liked her, nobody trusted her, but every respectable editorial in the land insisted she was the only proper dish on the menu. Meanwhile, Trump was roaring like a Mississippi riverboat gambler caught with three aces in his boot, and the public, tired of being starved on fancy French soup, was getting ready to eat the poker chips just to see the saloon catch fire.
And what did my soul feel during those wretched, humid afternoons? Shame, pure and suffocating shame, because deep in the underground of my own rotten conscience, a vile, demonic little voice was whispering: Let Trump win. Let the whole rotten theatre burn. Can you comprehend such wickedness? (I sound like Dostoevsky's underground lunatic here, but whatever.) To crave the disaster simply to witness the unbearable smugness stripped from the faces of these pious, comfortable hypocrites! It was not that I had any love for the orange monster, God forbid, he is a liar and a scoundrel like the rest. But the saintly lie, the grand, immaculate fraud of liberal decency, that is what nauseates a man until he wants to vomit his own liver onto the office carpet. But to be honest, how bad can he really be? Worse than the war mongering, lying, cheating cunt Obama? We are willing to invite the plague into our house just to prove that the physician was an imposter all along.
The truth is that Obama was never the saint these office liberals prayed to in their sleep. When the banks wrecked millions of working families in 2008, the holy man did not put the Wall Street executives in handcuffs; he handed them billions in public bailouts under TARP and let the foreclosures roll on through the suburbs like a quiet plague. He filled his cabinet with the same Clinton-era financiers who deregulated the market in the first place, ensuring the big lenders walked away with record bonuses while ordinary people lost their roofs and their dignity. He governed as a cold, calculating custodian of capital, smoothing over the cracks of an empire so the rot could spread without making a sound.
Think of the families who had put thirty years of honest sweat into four small walls and a patch of grass, only to find a sheriff's notice tacked to the front gate while the bailouts were cheered in the papers. The Affordable Care Act was paraded before the world as an act of immense charity, yet when the doors were opened, the private insurance companies had already written the ledger. The public option was cast out into the cold before the debate even began, leaving hard-working people legally bound to buy their sickness from the very monopolists who profited off their pain. It was a reform designed by accountants to preserve the market, leaving the mother counting pennies for her child's medicine while the shareholders declared their quarterly dividend.
And out in the factories and the shipping yards, the working man was told to tighten his belt and be grateful for two-tier wages. When the auto companies were saved, the bosses kept their mansions and the new assembly-line boys were hired at half the pay of their fathers. That is the great betrayal of the reformist: he sits at the table with the mill owner, signs a compromise, and tells the starving coolie outside that half a loaf of dry bread is a revolution. They pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership behind locked doors, shipping blue-collar livelihoods across the sea so multi billion dollar conglomerates could harvest cheaper sweat, and then turned around to wonder why the rust-belt factory hand hated their guts.
Down in the Southern states, along the border and out in the dust, the deportation buses ran day and night with a quiet efficiency that would have made an old sheriff weep with envy. Obama deported more undocumented souls than any president before him, tagging them through local police dragnets while giving speeches about the American dream. And over the skies of Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, the drones hummed like mechanical locusts. He sat in his warm study on Tuesday mornings picking names off a disposition matrix, sending Hellfire missiles straight into wedding tents and mud compounds, blowing women and children into red mist without a trial, without a charge, and without a headline. Yet our IT intellectuals never saw the blood because the pilot wore a clean uniform and the president spoke in complete, elegant sentences.
Can you hear the terrible clock ticking beneath the floorboards? We sit under these buzzing white lights, pretending history is a gentle river flowing toward enlightenment, while the beast stirs in the cellar. Obama did not prevent Trump; he prepared the soil for him. He took the desperate fury of a broken populace, gave them lofty speeches about hope, preserved the bankers, expanded the kill list, and left the cupboard empty. When you offer people a poisoned sweet wrapped in gold foil, you have no right to act surprised when they finally grab a brick and smash the shop window. The fluorescent tube flickers above my desk. I close the browser tab, pick up my badge, and walk back to the cubicle, sickened by the world, sickened by my colleagues, and most of all, sickened by myself.
Image Credit: Honoré Daumier, Le Ventre Législatif (The Legislative Belly), 1834 via Wikimedia Commons