Weekly Mind Dump: The Literary Masters on Today's Madness

Captain Ahab explains Donald Trump: "All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad."

C/o Warner Brothers

Week of 5/25-5/31, 2025:

There was a time when, if a U.S. president said the following, the forces of reason and patriotism would quickly mobilize to either impeach or invoke the 25th amendment to remove him:

(Donald Trump on Truth Social on May 31):

There is no Joe Biden – executed in 2020. Biden’s clones, doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. Democrats don’t know the difference.

(In an hour-long, rambling and incoherent commencement speech at West Point on May 31 while wearing a red MAGA hat):

The job of the U.S. Armed Forces is not to host drag shows to transform foreign cultures, but to spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun.

[Regarding golfer Gary Player:] He ended up getting a divorce. Found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife. It didn’t work out too well.

I went through a very tough time with some very radicalized sick, people. I say I was investigated more than the great, late Alphonse Capone.

(Recently on plans to seize friendly neighboring nations):

We really need Greenland for international security. We will acquire Greenland by any means necessary.

The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State.

My administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal, and we’ve already started doing it.

I have watched over the years the MAGA Cult devolve into an increasingly crazed nationwide primate exhibit, capturing the feeble brains of millions as well as the cold, calculating hearts of cynically opportunistic Republican politicians. I find the mass psychosis fascinating just as I recoil from the damage being done to our institutions and our national spirit. I’ve written extensively on this, citing the learned insights of mental health experts, sociologists, political scientists, historians and others. But I’ll confess that I still don’t get it. So, as our society and political system evolve further from the Orwellian to the Kafkaesque, to retain my sanity, I turn to literature.

Let’s start with two brilliant English writers:

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality,” wrote Lewis Carroll.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” wrote George Orwell in 1984.

I encourage readers to plunge back into the works of these two great writers, whose insights and wit are as valid today as they were in their times. “Alternate facts” is MAGA-speak for imagination, which is a key weapon they deploy against reality and reason in their barbaric quest to rescind the Enlightenment. Think of it as the caged primates hurling poop in response to our efforts at rational debate. As to “tearing human minds to pieces,” Trump has scored tremendous success in cuisinarting the brains of Republicans to enhance his perverse power.

More of Lewis Carroll:

“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

“If you don’t know where you are going any road can take you there.”

Exactly.

Now American Jack Kerouac:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

If you’re a MAGA moonie, this makes perfect sense and provides a guide toward a glorious hallucinogenic Shangri-la future with a magical Mad Hatter president as your sherpa.

Let’s now turn to another American literary great, Herman Melville, whose Captain Ahab ably explains the approach of our current captain of the ship of state:

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.

Lastly, let’s turn to a Russian author. In his short story, “Diary of a Madman,” Nikolai Gogol chronicles protagonist Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin’s descent into madness, showing how his perception of reality becomes increasingly distorted. His delusions include believing he’s the lost king of Spain. Moreover, Poprishchin’s anxieties about his low social status contribute to his unraveling. He fixates on his superiors and peers’ social positions, fueling his resentment and delusions of grandeur.

Remind you of somebody?

“I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man,” Poprishchin says. “I tell you, let no one think of me as humble or weak, for I have lived more intensely than others, I have felt all the sorrow and joy of life.”

I’m feeling better already. Now I’m getting it. You can too if you scamper off to your local library and take a deep dive into what the literary masters of the past have to tell us about today.