As the 2016 US presidential election results rolled in, with Donald Trump edging out Hillary Clinton in state after state, it became clear that Clinton was undone not by the private e-mail server scandal (or by Benghazi, or by the Wall Street conspiracies), but by closet Trump supporters.
Pollsters were flummoxed by people who had been ashamed to admit, even anonymously, that they would vote for Trump – yet who, in their brief moment of absolute privacy with an empty ballot, gave their support to a hate-peddling fraudster whose bigotry they endorse.
There were hordes of vocal Trump fans, of course, but not 59-million of them.
There were also the principled idiots who couldn’t find it in themselves to step down from the moral high ground to vote for the "tainted" Clinton and went for candidates who could not hope to win (including Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party) as a form of protest against the Democrat "establishment".
Almost 6-million votes, many of them in key states, were wasted in this way.
And then there was the most curious category of all: those who avowed disdain, even outright hatred, for Trump – but still expressed a perverse desire for him to win.
Perhaps most notoriously, the so-called "maverick" Marxist philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, wrote that a victory for Trump "would create a totally new political situation with chances for a more radical left".
In other words: US politics is rotten, the US economy is rotten, US foreign policy is rotten, so if Trump causes the whole lot to collapse, then maybe something better can be built from the ruins.
This kind of sentiment was doing the rounds on the physical and virtual streets of this country in the run-up to the US elections.
Bizarrely, Trumpism seems to be the only thing antigovernment free-market fundamentalists and self-described "radical leftists" have in common.
The libertarians are ideologically opposed to a strong state; the Fallists and the Fighters want a strong state, but one of their own making, requiring hobbled institutions to be destroyed and an imperfect constitution to be dismantled.
Revolution and burning: this is the millenarian fervour that hijacked the #FeesMustFall protests and that makes it possible for Julius Malema to invoke "invasion" and "slaughter" as justifiable, even preferable, means to a more equitable distribution of resources in this country.
The problem is that violent conflict, social fragmentation and economic instability almost always end up punishing the poor and disenfranchised more than they do the rich and privileged.
The negotiated settlement that led to the country’s inclusive 1994 democratic general elections was unsatisfactory in many ways. However, as writer and activist Sisonke Msimang has pointed out, our dissatisfaction should not lead us to reject entirely the notion of compromise in favour of "brinkmanship", "intransigence" — and, ultimately, war.
A powerful riposte to apocalyptic enthusiasm can be found in Entangled, an exhibition of monotype prints by Claire Zinn that is currently showing at David Krut Bookstore (142 Jan Smuts avenue, Parkwood, Johannesburg).
Zinn captures the contradictory but often twinned impulses of idealism and nihilism in her depictions of birds, which simultaneously represent freedom and have something in them of the primeval and atavistic.
She also portrays ambiguous battle scenes, in which the soldier figures are both horrifying and pitiful.
Perhaps this is because those who enact military conquest and terror are not culpable to the same degree as "Those Who Rule From Desks": the title of one of the more disturbing works on display, in which a host of bodies clash in chaos, kill, are killed, and then piled high. If it is a truism that the prosperity of the US has depended, more or less since the First World War, on the suffering of soldiers and civilians in wars fought far from the US — and that even Barack Obama, whose term in office was characterised by enforced compromise, could not overcome this — then four or eight years of a Trump presidency will just entrench it.
South Africans are, as citizens of the world, entangled in the US’s fateful decision.
Still, if we want to avoid Zinn’s doomsday vision of "Joburg Burning", the recognition of entanglement with our fellow South Africans is a matter of national urgency.
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