Last words are legendary. The godly Gandhi said, “Hey Ram!”; the deaf Beethoven said, “I shall hear in heaven”; the gallant Nelson said either “I’ve done my duty” or “Kiss me, Hardy”; and the thinker Karl Marx said, “Go on, get out; last words are for fools who haven’t said enough”.
These are words said to have been uttered by men when they were facing sure death—natural, induced or forced. But what do people say when they have escaped death?
We know too few. History is so obsessed with the dismal, the dead and the dying that it has recorded more words from deathbeds than from those who were springing back to life valiantly.
“Cheek!”—was all that Winston Churchill said after a sniper shot him in Athens in 1944. That one English word, verily pithy and uttered snootily, bore all the contempt that the civilised society can show towards the world’s cowardly Brutuses, Wilkes Booths, Lee Harvey Oswalds, Nathuram Godses, Beant Singhs and Dhanus.
Churchill was a master of words. Most others in his place have been pedestrian—like Gerald Ford. “You guys get off; you’re heavy,” was all that the prosaic Ford muttered to his aides who had thrown themselves over him, thus saving him from a second woman assassin within a space of three weeks. But then, Ford was a president who had “much to be humble about”, as Churchill had mocked his own successor Clement Attlee in the British Parliament.
None knew it more than Ford. “I am a Ford; not a Lincoln,” he said once, referring to the small car and the big car. That was perhaps the cleverest line that ever came out of him.
Donald Trump is neither a Churchill nor a Ford. He has neither the former’s intellect nor the latter’s decency. On the contrary, he has the worst of both—Churchill’s arrogance and Ford’s inadequacies.
Yet, for all you know, he may make it to the White House this time. Why? Because, as they say in America, he is no pushover. Look at him. Pinned down by his bodyguards after being shot in the ear, he asked for his shoes, rose to his full height in those, and exhorted his fans to “fight, fight”, even as they chanted “USA, USA”. Compare that with what the miserable Ford had said gasping under the human pile.
The shot in the ear has given his campaign a shot in the arm. In India, we call it sympathy vote. Not in America, where muscle and machismo get more votes than do tears.
Trump has faced blackmail, arrests, prosecutions, convictions and now an assassination bid. Yet he managed to stay alive, feisty, and very much in the race. Trump is street-smart in politics, as he had been in business.
To the rest of the world, Trump is the typical “ugly American”, a phrase that came into currency after rich Americans started travelling around war-ravaged but still-genteel Europe, flaunting money, talking loud, behaving brash, putting their feet up in train carriages, and holding the fork in the wrong hand. The term entered popular culture from the title of a 1958 book by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, and its film version released in 1963 starring Marlon Brando.
Sadly for America, the alternative is no great shakes either. The 81-year-old incumbent is getting known more for his gaffes, stumbles and missteps. Straw pollsters had been quietly saying he was losing. Now he is lost, they say within his earshot (pun intended). Well-wishers are asking him to yield place to a younger man, but Joe Biden is holding on to the Oval Office like the Old Man of the Sea on Sailor Sindbad’s back.
Who said democracy is a celebration of choices? Not in America.
prasannan@theweek.in