Outlaws...and humans trembling with tendernesss...May 30, 2025

 Like so many others, this scribe has been rummaging around in search of an image that is most fitting and appropriate for how to depict the tragic drama unfolding in America.

Outlaw figures have been explored in many American art forms, literature, film and music. Some of the obvious and deployed themes, (reasons, justifications, motivations, and contextualizations) that have characterized this image include:

Rebellion against authority, pursuit of freedom, the good badman and the fringes of Society are some of those themes.

Often too, they have been portrayed as having a commitment to some form of honour code.

From firstdraftpro.com, we read:

These characters are rule-breakers, often living on the fringe of society…Their rebellious nature invariably stirs conflict, propelling the narrative forward. Historically, the outlaw archetype has mirrored societal attitudes towards authority and rebellion. (For writers attempting to depict outlaws, this tutorial) …Avoid making them one-dimensional rebels or glorified miscreants. Ensure they have personal stakes and growth. Don’t rely on their rebellious nature; develop their relationships, ethical dilemmas, and internal conflicts to create a well-rounded character.

The literary perspective, however, is not the perspective of the news media. They are interested in ‘what defines the news’….From dictionary.cambridge.org,

News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media: word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication or through the testimony of observers and witnesses to events. News is sometimes called ‘hard news’ to differentiate it from soft media.

We cannot miss the obvious intersection of the ‘news’ treatment of outlaws with the literary treatment of outlaws, even if only one difference is considered….’ensure they have personal stakes and growth…don’t rely on their rebellious narture, develop their relationships, ethical dilemmas, and internal conflicts to create a well-rounded character.

First, the current incarnation of the American outlaw, has only a single ‘stake,’ the acquisition of whatever it takes to achieve universal fame, wealth, power, status, and growth too, is not measured in personal internal change, merely in terms of observable, measureable, dollar-documented wealth, buildings, titles, planes, and the single dimension of personal ‘world-endorsed, and world-wide-recognized status’ as ‘formidable, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent…all of this leaves any reporting confined to the stick-man, cardboard-cutout of a male, drawn in one-dimension by the chief executive himself, thereby eliminating any trait or behaviour that might hint at ‘intrinsic human value.’

So, the main-stream media are left to report, repeat, report, repeat, the same story every hour of every day, in the hope that something will interrupt the narrative….like the occasional district court judge, whose ruling will inevitably be appealed, stayed, and then we all await whatever the final outcome might be. Of course, the vagaries of applied tariffs on steroids almost universally, under false legal pretexts, (isn’t everything this outlaw does ‘under false pretexts’?) will be challenged in court, and whatever negative decision a court makes will be automatically appealed by the Oval Office, in order to continue the dance of the fanstastic, topsy-turvy, underworld of monsters and ghosts.

And while there is an ‘extreme’ oscillating pattern (theatrical, political psychological, legal, from one high Barnum and Bailey circus-like pronouncement, to one very low non-accomplishment, really another failure), there is an inescapable pseudo-drama of another artificial high, both for the protagonist as well as for the cult that is enthralled by the pseudo-drama. Some Wall Street wit has dubbed the elected president’s tariff wars in a four letter bumper sticker: TACO: Trump always chickens out.

This outlaw archetype seems to have morphed into a societal, cultural, political, and even geopolitical methamphetamine….a false, highly toxic and dangerous pseudo-chemical that induces a false ‘high as a mental state (apparently within the protagonist as well as within his acolytes and millions of adoring victims)  that can  offer neither the kind of catharsis of a Shakespearean tragedy, nor the political significance of a ‘Treaty of Versailles’ that truly commits signatories to a peace treaty….only to be abrogated decades later.

The single motive of a single man has somehow been given permission and impunity from legal restraint to enact whatever devious, heinous, nefarious, inhumane, sinister, and frozen-in-evil whims to starve millions of his own people, to destroy the traditions and the institutions that have been forged into the deep earth of the American psyche, and to wrest humanitarian aid from millions of desperate people around the world, and to bring the world economy to a screeching crash on a faux-brick wall that is composed of a single ‘human will attached to a papier maché conscience.

And it is for this rather complicated convergence of the literary, the journalistic, the legal, the medical and the underworld traits of a drama such as we have never fully experienced, that renders those who might be opposed, appalled, and frightened (not to mention the intimidation and lethal threats against any and all opponents), confused, dumb-founded, frustrated, stunned, scrambling and grasping at any straw that might possibly bring some relief, or at least a pause in the Chain Stokes national breathing…

And it can be missed by no amateur observer, even this one foreigner, that something akin to the death throes of a dying COPD patient is also analogous to this moment, if viewed from the perspective of an attending Emergency Room doctor.

It is almost as if by strangulation of the air waves, the universities, the media, the very truth itself, as well as of the international leaders whose pitiable pilgrimages to kiss the ring of this pseudo-pope, this kangaroo-court-king, and this emperor with no clothes has succeeded in not merely projecting emasculation on his nation and much of the world, but has also tragically and permanently divulged the self-sabotage of his own emasculation….for all of this pseudo-power, what emerges when all is said and done, is nothing less than a colossal, pitiable, helium-inflated, vacuous eunuch…envisioned so poetically by T.S. Eliot in his poem, The Hollow Men:

We are (He is) the hollow men

We are the hollow men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw, Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind against dry grass

Or rat’s feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without

   Colour

Paralysed force, gesture without

   Motion……

And while this piece is written about the plural “we”…..the danger Eliot envisions is not an exaggeration of the potential fate of America….(from the latter portion of the same poem)

This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplications of a dead man’s

   Hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star

Is it like this

In death’s other kingdom

Waking alone

At this hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone…..

Humans trembling with tenderness still work and live and pray and worship and read and study and invent and produce and manage and uplift other humans trembling with tenderness across America…

And it is those humans trembling with tenderness, together, that will experience the force of their tenderness slaying this phantom dragon, eventually!