The cure

 The guy doesn't know what love is.

The closest he can come is the bloodlust he engenders in a mob of strangers, their intellects full of holes like sponges to soak up his venom.

“Now that's what I'm sayin',” they say, loving that Queens gameshow host voice, whining with arrogance and victimhood in every breath.

“He's our voice” they say, even though he sounds nothing like them.

“This is what the leader of America should look like. Whatever he says, that's what I say.”

“He” – who has nothing but contempt for people like them who buy their clothes at Walmart, but like them, likes lots of ketchup on his food – “is us.”

Actually, he's not. Beyond having tapped into their resentments of people smarter than they are, or otherwise more entitled, they have nothing in common.

“I love you,” he tells them, even though he doesn't. He lies. He doesn't know them. He doesn't know what love is.

“We love you,” they yell back, and mean it.

“Tell us what to do. Tell us what we think.”

It's the chicken and egg riddle, updated for minds molded, or melted, by media. When did “Reality” become an entertainment category amidst the other escapes and distractions on our screens, some covering walls in our homes, others fitting comfortably in the palms of our hands …? 

When did we put our brains in our pockets?

Ironies abound, chuckling that it's come to this, a Reality star ruling our reality.

He has the survival instincts of a reptile masquerading as a human, or superhuman, or virus, with powers to infect thousands through nothing more the airborne transmission of his words.

Those words that will be amplified, millions and billions of times through invisible loutspeakers, to infect an entire nation, an entire planet.

He is the great pretender: I am not really a president, I just play one on TV.

He is someone having a horrible incarnation, hip holy man Ram Dass once explained to me when he was still alive. That explanation wouldn't wash with the cheering mobs in their hats, bright red, the color of fresh blood. They don't know what incarnation means, and they don't trust people who do. People who can't even talk about humility and gratitude without being smug about it.

Malignant narcissism was another explanation from some TV psychologist, trying to analyze behavior that defies analysis. How to understand the casual cruelty and laser-focused vindictiveness? Is this much selfishness too lethal for a normal human to withstand? It's understandable coming from a baby in diapers. After that, not so much. 

His mere existence – not to mention, the most powerful man on the planet in recent years – is an affront to everything it means to be human, at least for seven million more Americans than the seventy-four million who adore him. 

How can such a wide swath of witnesses disagree so completely about what they just saw? 

How can they get back to the starting point if they can't agree what it looks like?

Which came first, the cognitive or the dissonance?

What is it about us that gave rise to him? That created him? And what is the magnetic pull on those who despise him that keep bringing us back to the subject?

He's a scab you can't stop picking at, despite knowing that only makes the infection worse.

The only cure is exorcism, erasure, forgetting. To sleep, perchance to dream …

The only cure is to know what love is.