I Think About This A Lot: Human Monsters
I’ve read two recent books about garbage humans for reasons I can’t even assess. Maybe I just like to see to what depths are the lowest, and maybe I am seeking to see the reasons WHY they are so horrible. I am speaking of Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man and Jean Guerrero’s Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. Both are unsurprising: both of these men were horrible since childhood and have remained that way, bolstered by people around them who enabled their horribleness.
Stephen Miller, since middle school was an unfunny Alex P. Keaton, wearing suits to work and saying outrageous things to be contrary. People thought it was...cute? He was praised for being so well spoken. His parents encouraged it and at present, are just proud that he is famous and successful and don’t ever challenge his views.
Both books delve rather boringly and unnecessary into the lives of their parents, as if something in their lives will break the puzzle of awfulness. Both had distant fathers and ambivalent mothers. That can certainly shape someone’s character as a child but, no matter how hard your childhood is, at some point you have your own free will to do the right thing and to be a better person. Maybe you can’t realize this at 14, at 18, and even in your twenties. But at some point, it is an excuse and we have to comprehend that these are inherent evil people, born into darkness and placed here to wreak havoc and act as agents of chaos.
In fact, I take issue with these books delving in family pasts. Even mentioning it suggests that there is something in there that made these two men act the way they do, when, in fact, the hate is all their own.
Yet I fall for it every time- I am the first to read some sort of “tell-all,” looking for the clues about what the point of no return, where the person could have made another decision. The only comfort, if that, is that both Trump and Miller are miserable people, trying to find happiness in power and failing every time.