is Trump Gatsby?

Got what I got the hard way
And I'll make it better each and every day
So honey don't you fret
'Cause you ain't seen nothing yet
I'm a soul man


[horns:  da - dah - da - da   da-dah]


I'm a soul man







In the documentary film, Respect Yourself:  The Stax Records Story, they say of the song "Soul Man" -- "It means, with any hardship that you have in your life, you're able to -- get back up, and -- keep movin'...."











-------------------------



-------------------------





Is President-Elect Donald Trump a soul man?





Is he Gatsby?


-------------------------- [excerpt, So We Read On, 2014] ------------------ After you read The Great Gatsby the first time, you reread it forevermore with the awareness that those last six and a half pages -- and, especially, those final two paragraphs -- are waiting for you. 


It's like what happens when you hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or "Hey, Jude" for the second time:  you know that something extraordinary lies at the end of the piece.
 
["Heeeeeyyyyyy! -- Jud - ee  Jud - ee  Jud - ee  Jud - ee!!!"] 


I've quoted those lines throughout this book, but they deserve to be quoted in full one more time:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.  It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther....

And one fine morning ----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

They never get old, those words.  If they ever do, I'll know it's time to hang up my reading glasses. 


I read The Maltese Falcon some years after I first read The Great Gatsby, but there's a passage in Hammett's novel that comes closest to expressing for me what happens when a great work of art comes into your life and changes you. 


Hammett's detective Sam Spade





is telling a story about a man named Flitcraft who has a near brush with death when a beam from a construction site almost falls on him. 


Spade says about Flitcraft:  "He felt as though someone had lifted the lid off life and let him look at the works." 


That's how I feel when I read or hear or see any great work of art, but in particular, that's how I feel when I reread The Great Gatsby and reach those last paragraphs: 


I feel like Fitzgerald has taken the lid off life and let me look at the works. ---------------------- [end, excerpt] -------------------------


If the Presidency "takes the lid off" of Donald Trump, do we want to see "the works"...?





The prospect of an inaugural address is perplexing and somewhat unimaginable, to me...


__________________________


{excerpt from So We Read On, by Maureen Corrigan.  2014.  Back Bay Books; Little, Brown and Company, New York - Boston - London.}


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