There are events in every person’s life that remain in the mind (and, therefore, the heart and spirit) like sign posts on the (so far) endless road to which one can return when necessary for guidance ahead or to see how far one has traveled. Some, like the birth of a child, are filled with mystery, wonder and the joy of life; others are reminders of the inscrutable danger, misery and vile creatures, people and circumstances that each of us inescapably experiences and really hopes to avoid in the future.
In the latter category, two events from my life often come to mind: I was in a starless hotel in a country of poverty when I contracted a serious case of food poisoning. For 24 hours I alternately and at times all at the same time (truly) vomited, shat, shivered and sweated and, after cleaning myself up, returned to bed feeling as sick and exhausted as I have ever felt. When an another expulsion event seemed to be arriving I went to the bathroom with the hole in the concrete floor toilet and took my best aim from whichever orifice was cocked and loaded, cleaned up and went back to bed. One time I was kneeling on the floor vomiting into the hole in the concrete floor and I passed out. I don’t know how long I was out (it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes) but when I woke I was looking into the opening (about 3 by 3 inches wide) from which flowed the water that drained into and cleaned out the shit and vomit in the hole in the floor toilet. My understandably wretched feelings and thoughts were overlaid by the monstrous and bizarre when a small albino toad appeared out of the hole which provided the small stream of water carrying shit and vomit to someplace I hope never to see. The albino toad and I contemplated each other for an indeterminate time before it (I lacked the knowledge to determine its gender) turned and vanished back into the hole in the wall. I assume the repugnance I felt towards the albino toad was mutual, and its presence symbolized my feelings, thoughts and physical state at that moment. How could it not?
The second event took place a few years later about as far removed from the first as, say, poverty and a shit hole albino toad are from the White House, at least so I used to think. At Christmas 1989 I was Director of the Aspen Mountain Ski School in Aspen, Colorado, a great job at what I considered to be the best ski school in America. Christmas in Aspen, as in most ski resorts, is busy. For obvious reasons, the Aspen Mountain Ski School has a higher percentage of the famous, wealthy, privileged and powerful among its clientele than most American areas. The majority of these ‘high end’ customers were and are happy and grateful to be skiing, gracious, friendly, accommodating and relatively easy to interact with for ski school personnel who make their livings off tips and repeat clients. After all, going skiing, even at a Christmas maximum busy resort, is for most people not like a visit to the dentist or proctologist, but, as is the case with every demographic and every walk of life, there are those few whose personal mental/spiritual/psychic/physical suffering is so deep and unaddressed from within that their response is to project their inner root canal/rectal nightmares on the people and larger world before them. The ski school desk, like every restaurant, coffee shop, ski shop, bar, grocery store, taxi service, massage parlor and other business in town, was jamming. I don’t recall if I was called out of my office to the front desk or if I just went there to check and see how things were going, but I arrived to find the normal lines of people waiting to arrange ski lessons, including a man who stood out from the crowd for several reasons and who I will, unfortunately, never forget.
This large man was topped with an impressive pile of blondish hair that looked like a wig requiring a great deal of time and effort to put and maintain in place. He was haranguing the desk staff in a loud voice that left no decibels for others about a ski lesson he wanted and had the money to pay for and was tired of waiting in endless lines to get. The most polite words I can use to describe my first impression of Donald Trump are ‘he was really offensive.’ I had no idea who he was and, as it turned out over the years, the more I learned the less I cared for him, a dangerous, insidious dynamic. Dealing with a few difficult, distasteful people is part of any job in the service industry, and the ski school desk staff quickly connected Trump with a suitable instructor and got them out of the office and off to the hill, much to the relief of staff and the other customers waiting patiently to arrange ski lessons and get on with their day.
It took Donald Trump only a few minutes to leave an indelible impression on me personally, as well as the ski school desk staff (and, I feel safe in presuming, the other customers) as being the most repugnant, self-centered, rudest human being any of us had ever encountered. And loud. Yes, LOUD. After that morning, any ski school customer who behaved in an uncooperative, arrogant or imperious manner was usually compared with Donald Trump on the asshole scale. None came close to his score.
The one bright aspect of Trump’s visit for me is that Ivana Trump, Donald’s wife of 13 years at the time, and her friend and fellow Czech, the great author, Jerzy Kosinski, who also lived in New York City, requested an instructor for the day. Every ski instructor was working, so I spent most of the day skiing with Ivana and Jerzy. (I wish I could remember if Donald was involved in the request and transaction, but I don’t.) Neither Ivana nor Jerzy needed instruction, but as is common in Aspen and elsewhere for those who can afford it, a ski instructor is handy for cutting lift lines and as tour guide knowing the terrain and snow conditions. Ivana, an ex- ski racer, was an excellent skier, unlike her husband who was not, and Jerzy was very good which meant that skiing with them was really fun. In addition, they were both intelligent, engaged, good conversationalists and easy to be with. As a writer it was an honor to ski with Kosinski and I enjoyed telling him how much I admired his work and seeing his pleasure in such recognition. I was saddened when less than a year and a half later he committed suicide. It was none of my business, so I made a point of not dwelling on the relationship between a charming Ivana and her repulsive mate.
A few days later some of the private details of that relationship went public and became an integral part of Aspen lore regarding the rich and famous.
Donald was on vacation in Aspen not only with his wife but with his mistress as well, and it seems he was as discrete about his double life as he was soft spoken about whatever was on his mind. Her name was Marla Maples and within the year she would become Donald’s next wife. Ivana was unaware that Donald had a mistress or that he had brought her to Aspen for the family vacation. Ivana had never even heard the name Marla Maples. Then, on December 30, 1989 it all came out in a most public venue after Ivana overheard her husband on the telephone refer to someone named Marla, though, according to broadcast journalist Barbara Walters who interviewed Ivana in 1991, Ivana’s Czech accent reported the name as ‘Moola.’
According to the Chicago Tribune, a Chicago decorator on vacation recognized Donald walking down the main street of Aspen with his arm around a blond and assumed it was Ivana. The designer told the Tribune, “Same size, same hair. I walked around to look, but it wasn’t her.” A day or so later the designer was present on December 30 when Ivana and Marla met for the first time at Bonnie’s, a restaurant described by the Tribune as, “…where everyone goes for lunch, the most public spot in Aspen, the equivalent of, oh, say, the lobby of Trump Tower. Then, Donald and Ivana put on a show for the holiday skiers. ‘They walked out of the restuarant together,’ says the decorator. ‘She was talking and he was trying to shush her. Then they both stopped to put on their skis. She was a little behind him and she was being kind of playful, bumping into him. But then they stopped about 50 feet away from the sundeck. She was facing us and he had his back to us and it`s now clear that they’re fighting. She’s waving her hands and yelling at him. And now everybody decides, ‘This is interesting’ and we all go over to the railing. It goes on for 25 minutes. It went on forever! Every now and then she tried to make up and put her arms around him, but he pulled back, he wouldn’t respond. He finally skied off, and everyone started clapping and cheering. She smiled and waved to the crowd and skied away in his direction. But I saw them near the next lift, and they were still going at it.’”
The Aspen Sojurner provided a somewhat different take on the day: “When Ivana Trump and Marla Maples encountered each other on Aspen Mountain during the Christmas holidays of 1989, the story went around the world in at least three or four different versions, one of which made the front page of the next day’s New York Post. What is known for sure is that both women were in Aspen, with The Donald, at the same time. And only one of them, Ivana, was married to him. The rest of the details varied considerably.
“Some claim Ivana approached Marla in Bonnie’s restaurant and demanded, “You bitch, leave my husband alone!” Others say the confrontation occurred on the ski slope at the bottom of Little Nell, where they threw snowballs and hissed at each other. Ivana has said, “She came to me on the mountain and told me she was in love with my husband and they were having an affair. It was extremely painful.” Still others insist that the real source of the contretemps was that both were wearing identical expensive ski suits, possibly purchased by Trump for each of them. Whatever really happened, the result was divorce court.”
So…..almost 30 years ago Donald Trump impressed a hard to impress Christmas Colorado ski town as an infantile, duplicitous narcissist whose care and concern for the world began and ended at his own skin. I never forgot him, though, to me at the time he was just a New York City real estate tycoon who gave his profession and home town bad names while relaxing on vacation. Hard to imagine what he might do or be when he was working at it. I didn’t know it, but by that time his name was on a New York Times bestselling book, “The Art of the Deal,” though, in reality, he hired a ghost writer to actually do the writing, something he subsequently did with a hundred more books listing Donald Trump as author. I’ve long been amused and informed that I’d never heard of Trump who had achieved a certain standard of value in our society by his book being on the NYT best seller list in company with Kosinski, among others, whose work I deeply value. To think about Trump is to think about a lack of integrity and other core values. I can’t truly say that I ever ‘met’ Trump (I doubt many have), but I did ‘encounter’ him, and to encounter Trump is to encounter a vacuum of integrity in which a deal is in the art of charlatans rather than in words of integrity and value.
A couple of years later I left Aspen and don’t remember ever thinking about Trump for more than 10 years until I read news reports (I don’t own a TV) of Donald Trump hosting a TV show called “The Apprentice.” Wow! My weak interest in watching TV lost some of its strength but I considered a show starring Trump a disturbing anomaly not worth the time to watch. The disturbance was not Trump, for there have always been people lacking redeeming qualities, but, rather, that enough people to support a national TV show actually were interested in watching him publicly humiliate people. Had I (and many others) paid more attention to that dynamic and its significance we would not have been so taken off guard a few years later when he became a candidate for President of the United States and, later, when he lost the democratic popular election by three million votes and was nevertheless named President.
It is worth noting, three weeks before democratically losing the 2016 election which gerrymandered him into the White House, Trump said, “Remember, we are competing in a rigged election. They even want to try and rig the election at the polling booths, where so many cities are corrupt and voter fraud is all too common.” That statement is ironic, funny or chilling, depending, but whatever the implications to American democracy of him calling the election ‘rigged’ and losing by three million votes while still becoming Commander in Chief of the most powerful military on earth, 60 million American citizens voted for Donald Trump. Though the majority of racist Americans do not admit their racism, some of those 60 million votes were in response to Barack Obama having served as President. (I have a Trump supporter friend who, during a political conversation, brought up The Bell Curve as justification for his dislike of Obama. When I pointed out that The Bell Curve is a thoroughly debunked racist polemic, he responded that he didn’t realize it was racist or based on fraudulent scientific research and that since he wasn’t a racist he wouldn’t bring up The Bell Curve in any more ‘political’ conversations. I was reminded more of the hole from which emerged the albino toad than the rabbit hole of Alice in Wonderland.) Though a majority of sexist Americans do not admit to their sexism, some of those 60 million voters simply could not accept a female in the White House. (I have another Trump supporter friend who told me he couldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she was ‘dishonest.’ When I pointed out the humor in choosing ‘dishonesty’ as a reason for supporting Trump over Clinton he quit communicating with me.) Despite the white-washed image of equality America has always preached and presented to the world and itself, racism and sexism are endemic to American society.
They have been from the beginning. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were, after all, slave owners. Jefferson fathered children with his slaves. Washington made his living buying and selling slaves. This from the timeline of the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection Home Page on the Library of Congress website: “Abigail Adams writes to her husband, John, who is attending the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, asking that he and the other men who were at work on the Declaration of Independence ‘Remember the Ladies.’ John responds with humor. ‘The Declaration’s wording specifies that “all men are created equal.”’ It is worth noting here that the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” (The first draft of the Declaration was worded “…all free men are created equal…”, but Jefferson, the primary writer of the Constitution, cut out the word ‘free.’
That is, throughout America’s history people of color and females have not legally or practically enjoyed certain unalienable rights of equality granted to the white males of America. Nor do they or those whose private sexual preferences, personal religious beliefs or birth in the ‘wrong’ country put them in the category of ‘other’ enjoy them today. Trump’s support comes from those citizens who want to keep it that way.
And there is this:
We are all complicit in allowing those inequalities to persevere and, thereby, helping to propel Donald Trump into the White House, each of us in our own way.
This is one of mine: In 1988, the Christmas before Trump appeared at the ski school desk in Aspen, I was sitting at The Sundeck, the restaurant at the top of Aspen Mountain taking a break from the busyness of Christmas with a cup of coffee. Two months earlier I had undergone major back surgery and was not at optimum physical, mental or emotional form. My table was close to The Sundeck ski school desk which was staffed that day by a woman who was a highly regarded long-time employee of the ski company and a friend. A middle-aged, well-groomed man approached the desk and inquired about a lesson he had reserved for that day. He was told that the instructor that had been assigned to him had phoned in sick and that there were no available instructors. She apologized for the inconvenience and offered to re-schedule his lesson for the next day. The man immediately began haranguing her in a loud voice, insulting her personally and the ski school as a business and coming a bit unglued. On a Trump scale of 10 he was only about a 5, but offensive enough that I intervened. I introduced myself as the Ski School Director and apologized for the disruption in his plans, pointed out that an employee who comes down sick is beyond the control of the ski school, and told him that if he would apologize to our desk employee for his unwarranted behavior I would see what could be done about accommodating him that day. He ramped up to about a 6 on the scale and made it clear he was not interested in an apology, the ski school or anyone connected to it and left huffing in a huff. Good riddance, except that losing customers is not in the best interests of any business, and I gave a lot of thought to how the situation might have been handled differently. I never arrived at an answer that placed human rights and decency on an equal footing with economics.
A year later when I encountered Trump I don’t remember this incident entering my mind, but it surely had an effect on my own and the ski school’s response to Trump’s behavior of giving him what he wanted in order to take his money and get him out of the way so other customers could pay their money in a more civilized environment. The civically/socially/morally responsible action to have taken when Trump threw his tantrum at the ski school desk would have been to call security (or, if necessary, the police) and have him escorted out of the building. That never crossed my mind, but in retrospect I feel I failed my country by not doing that. I wish I had.
You see, there is this, then and now: It is reasonable to posit that if a large black male sporting an outsized, well-coifed Afro or Long-Plaited Dreadlocks, or any female flaunting any hair style, had behaved like Donald Trump at the ski school desk, police would have been immediately summoned and he/she would be, at the least, ejected from the building and told not to return.
That is America, and Donald Trump embodies it.
Don’t you think?
And what are you doing about IT?