I CAN THINK OF NO OTHER EXPLANATION

Note: what follows is in no way intended to refer to any living normal human being.

I am eighty-four years old, I have watched with interest the political developments and personalities of five countries for many years, I grew up with lived stories of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, and I am now faced with President Ubu, an enigma that calls for an explanation before any reaction can be contemplated.

Ubu is not like Vladimir Putin. Putin is an unscrupulous KGB-er with a greater than usual talent for the logistics of tyranny. Putin feels that “the West” has humiliated his rodina, his motherland, and in this he is not entirely wrong. Being an unscrupulous KGB-er, his instinctive reaction is tyranny at home and revenge abroad. The result is a sullen silence at home and the sound of closing doors as formerly friendly countries depart.

Ubu is not like Josef Vissarionovich Djukashvili, the Man of Steel or Stalin. Stalin was a darkly savage brute whose only dream was power, for himself and for his country with which he identified even as he despised it. Stalin did not invade Ukraine: he depopulated it by starving its inhabitants. Stalin created Siberian labour camps, kangaroo courts and mock trials and killed more people than even his German rival. 

Ubu is not like Adolf Schicklgruber alias Hitler. Hitler was a minor but brave soldier ulcerated by defeat, by the humiliation of Versailles and by the fearsome economic collapse that followed. Hitler was not a great man but an ordinary one who pursued his dream of greatness with the merciless application of his one talent: oratory and publicity, and pursued it in the key of goosestepping militarism.

Ubu has a bit of each of them, but is essentially less. He has the resentment of Putin, but pettier; he has the power-hunger of Stalin but does not dare actually kill; he has the publicity talent of Hitler but not the discipline. He has the mental equipment of a twelve-year-old and the emotional maturity of a fourteen-year-old. He is old, fat and ugly; his speeches are the wandering rambles of senility; his mind is a television screen where reality appears in video clips with sound bites; he agrees with the last person he has talked with; and underneath it all, he is constantly trying to prove to the ghost of his father that he is not the “loser” that ghost accuses him of being. In other words, he is childish, narcissistic and of a stupendous unimportance.

And he is the most powerful man on a planet of 7 billion others; he rules that planet’s most powerful country; he has turned hundreds of powerful, intelligent politicians into slinking, craven bootlickers whose only idea of policy is whatever he dictates from moment to moment; and he has surrounded himself with an inner circle of clever, unscrupulous men who are helping him thoroughly to destroy the nation they claim to serve. 

    For make no mistake: the goal is destruction. The country’s democratic institutions must be humiliated, undermined, laid low and demolished. From social services that help the sick, the poor and the miserable to universities that produce cutting-edge research in medicine, science, mathematics, technology but also in history, literature, anthropology, art and music: all must be destroyed, utterly. And it is happening. Extraordinary as it may seem, he scores victory after victory, triumph after triumph; whenever he is finally about to fail, fate gives a twist of its tail and he comes out, once again on top. And the country bleeds, like some Egyptian camel described by Lawrence Durrell that is being dismembered with axes while still alive, to make a meal for the assembled pilgrims.

This is not possible. This cannot be happening. An evil twelve-year-old who pulls the wings off flies cannot have near-absolute power over the earth’s geatest former democracy. It does not add up. 

There must be an element we are missing, says the Startrek observer studying this, to the Captain. 

There is. I can think of no other explanation. I have resisted it as long as I could, but it keeps coming back.

Demonic possession. Most people no longer believe in it. But Father Vincent Lampert, the Vatican-trained official exorcist for the Diocese of Indianapolis, a cheerful realist who has exercised his profession for 18 years, has no doubts whatever about its existence. It is rare but real, and is accompanied by other types of infernal activity.

I am reluctantly but ineluctably coming to believe that Ubu is – now, if not for all of his earlier life – the vehicle for – well, we should perhaps avoid naming him. But he, the Nameless, does appear to be riding Ubu, directing him, and collapsing the knees and the consciences of all who come into contact with him. With the goal, of course, which always Nameless’s: destruction, damnation, chaos and Hell. 

What is needed is not only resistance. It is the charity of exorcism, as well. Ubu is not beyond salvation; but, steered by Nameless, he has corrupted the conscience of millions of supposed Christians. Those Christians who have his, as well as the country’s, well-being at heart; who still believe in the Incarnation, the Bible, the Cross and the Resurrection; will need not only to be innocent as doves but to be wise as serpents; to be very afraid, very courageous, very prayerful – and to find and convince a great exorcist.  

Image: Le portrait du Père Ubu, by Alfred Jarry