“I’m not a witch — I’m your wife! And I’m not sure I want to be that anymore.” - The Princess Bride
That line — funny, furious, and fed up — may be the best metaphor we have for what just happened to the Reiner family.
“I think you are a very bad man,” said Dorothy.
“Oh, no, my dear; I’m really a very good man, but I’m a very bad Wizard, I must admit.”
-L. Frank Baum ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’
To be offended by what Donald Trump said because it was brash — and not see the truth in it, or remember the loss of his brother, Frederick Crist Trump Jr., and the lessons of addiction — is to reveal the very sickness he was pointing at.
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Trump has a gift.
And he doesn’t need to win another election for it to matter.
We would be wise to stop clutching pearls, because while so many are preoccupied with tone, optics, and the socialist-realist lie that there is a “right side of history,” people are suffering and people are dying. Not from bad policy, but from Party Spirit and spectacle.
We’ve turned pain into theater and suffering into a poorly written sitcom.
That’s not the fault of politicians or celebrities. That’s our fault and the work now is not the work of politics it’s ours. It’s the work of memory. It’s the work of being human.
You saw it:
“Trump was too blunt.”
“It’s not presidential to speak that way.”
“The optics are wrong.”
“It’s not the right time.”
As if tragedy or grief has a dress code. As if truth is only allowed at the microphone if it passes a tone test.
The moment we are more offended by delivery than by death, something ancient has been lost.
This isn’t just politics.
This is the desecration of kavod ha-met, the Jewish ethic of honoring the dead.
We didn’t pause. We performed. And the soul of the story evaporated.
It Would Take a Miracle
There is a big difference between all dead and slightly alive.
That line might as well be prophecy now.
The body politic is not all dead. Neither is Jewish memory. But both have been left on the slab by people who forgot that ritual performance is not resurrection and the political witch hunt ritual is deadly.
It would take a miracle to remember what covenant actually requires. And that miracle begins with one small act:
Not lying.
Not lying about grief. Not lying about history. Not lying about the cost of staying silent because “it’s not polite.”
It would take a miracle. But that’s exactly where Jewish memory begins.
We Know Who the Six-Fingered Man Is
And it isn’t just one man.
Every Jewish child knows the villains in The Princess Bride.
Prince Humperdinck.
The one who is mediocre, insecure and cowardly but who maintains his power by force and empty phrases.
The six-fingered man.
The one who stole, betrayed, gaslit, and maimed.
Inigo Montoya didn’t just want vengeance.
He wanted it remembered.
He wanted to say it to the machine itself:
“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
The story we’re in now, where grief is trimmed to soundbites, trauma is monetized, and those who scream truth are called “too much” …we are expected to forget who the six-fingered men are.
They don’t wear cloaks. We remember them. Because we’ve heard that sound before.
The Machine
In The Princess Bride, Westley is strapped to a wooden slab in “The Machine.”
The six-fingered man doesn’t just torture him — he steals years of his life.
He turns pain into data.
He makes agony efficient.
He mechanizes despair.
Sound familiar?
The body on the slab is still twitching, but the six fingered men want “measured takes.” They want emotion sanitized enough to sell, but not so raw that it costs them anything.
The Machine wasn’t built for war. It wasn’t built for justice. It wasn’t even built to kill quickly.
It was built because some like to watch.
That’s the real horror. The Machine is what happens when people becomes addicted to the view from above, when the theater forgets why we stopped human sacrifice in the first place.
The Machine doesn’t kill because it must. It kills because it can. And because someone wanted a front-row seat they knew they didn’t deserve.
The Machine Trump Saw
Donald Trump didn’t build the machine. He walked in and kicked it. That’s why they hate him. Not for his vulgarity. Not for his wealth. Not even for his politics. They hate him because he pointed to the slab. He pointed to the cruelty masked as decorum — and he laughed.
They wanted the device. He was the truth-telling clown, the illuminated showman.
“No dear, I’m a very good man — I’m just a very bad wizard.” - The Wizard of Oz
Trump didn’t invent the spectacle. He broke the fourth wall, he reminded the audience: You’re not in the balcony. You’re in the pit. Oh yes. The pit of despair.
The Genius of the Crowd
Charles Bukowski warned us:
there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day
and the best at murder are those who preach against it and the best at hate are those who preach love and the best at war finally are those who preach peace
those who preach god, need god those who preach peace do not have peace those who preach love do not have love
beware the preachers beware the knowers beware those who are always reading books beware those who either detest poverty or are proud of it beware those quick to praise for they need praise in return beware those who are quick to censor they are afraid of what they do not know beware those who seek constant crowds for they are nothing alone beware the average man the average woman beware their love, their love is average seeks average
but there is genius in their hatred there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you to kill anybody not wanting solitude not understanding solitude they will attempt to destroy anything that differs from their own not being able to create art they will not understand art they will consider their failure as creators only as a failure of the world not being able to love fully they will believe your love incomplete and then they will hate you and their hatred will be perfect
like a shining diamond like a knife like a mountain like a tiger like hemlock
their finest art
Bukowski Weimar born knew what he named.
And what he named Trump didn’t invent. Trump revealed.
“To Blave” vs. “True Love
Miracle Max’s wife catches the lie:
“Liar! LIAR! LI-AR!”
She knows the difference between “to blave” which Max claims means “to bluff” and “true love.”
We’ve been blaving for years. Bluffing our way through grief. Spinning loss into content. Calling it “measured response” when it’s actually cowardice.
True love doesn’t wait for the right optics. True love storms the castle with a wheelbarrow and a holocaust cloak.
Trump, the man, had a brother who suffered. He’s been clear about how that changed him. His sobriety frightens those who choose shame before they risk their own. That is cowardice. And we fed it because we bit the bait. We let party spirit consume us and burned too many lives on its altar.
Trump didn’t offer perfect medicine. But he didn’t offer *pharmakon* either.
He looked at the body on the slab and said what Miracle Max said:
“There’s a big difference between all dead and slightly alive.”
He refused to let the slab become the grave.
The Scream That Pierced Time
When Westley screams from The Machine, Inigo freezes.
He doesn’t recognize it as Westley’s suffering. He recognizes it as his own, the sound he made when his father was murdered.
“That is the sound of ultimate suffering.”
He heard in that scream a memory of grief so true, so searing, it crossed time.
That is why he ran toward it.
Because he remembered.
Because that pain wasn’t abstract, it was his.
And that is how a miracle begins: not with belief in magic, but with memory.
The real miracle isn’t who wins. It’s who remembers, not just what was said, but what was lost.
The miracle is not perfection.
The miracle is *witness*.
And witness demands this:
- Don’t lie about grief.
- Don’t rewrite the dead.
- Don’t ritualize pain for spectacle.
- Don’t forget the names.
The Miracle
The miracle, if it comes, will be that we dare to re-member and then speak truth so fully that the lie cannot breathe.
Receipts (September 5, 2021)
Before anyone calls this hindsight, here’s what I wrote three years ago in response to a Washington Post columnist declaring on Twitter that anyone who questioned an election “should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into ‘polite society.’ We have a list.”
“So......yeah. These people think of themselves as the antidote to fascism.
Can you imagine what she means by “polite society?”
I mean really.
These must be some pretty awful parties. I’m imagining Salem meets Jonestown with just a dash of NXIVM.
The party never lasts forever though. Not even in the new normal.
After the literati have retreated back to their sticky, benzo and adderall inspired hidey holes, empty bottles of Chateauneuf-du-Pape clanking in the bins next to their standing desks after their latest Clubhouse fête, vague and grimy promises made and given between frenemies insecurely rolling into their respective memory holes, the cold reality dawns even before the ink of history has dried.
Now in the same Slack, it’s Lord of the Flies.
I would imagine that such rhetoric like hers would de facto be considered impolite society.
But hey. Some people like their culture with a dash of sociopathy and just the whisper of the promise of sadism. Who am I to harsh their kink?
I known. I’m being unfair. They work so tediously, I mean tirelessly; to bring truth to power and find voices that would want to be voiced by the voices they voice. They must be exhausted from formulating all those empathy canards; the stunning bravery that’s inspired countless suicides.
Yet still. What a terrible wake up call these maniacs are in for. Man, I don’t think anyone deserves that hangover. Well. Maybe a few do…
I saw the machine then, I’m naming it now. This isn’t hindsight. This is memory doing what memory does, refusing to let the pattern disappear into the spin cycle.
May the memory of the Reiner family be a blessing.
May the legacy of their work, as writers, witnesses, and storytellers, long outlive the politics that try to hijack grief for spin.
May those of us who forgot the warning against the effects of Party Spirit in Washington’s Farewell Address, or failed to take seriously those who named the inversion of it, finally begin to listen.
Amen and well said.
Well said.