COME HOME, DONALD - Alastair McIntosh
(Photo above of abandoned settlement looking down towards where Donald Trump’s maternal ancestors were evicted on the Isle of Lewis.)
Donald Trump was a controversial name in his mother’s home nation, Scotland, long before he ran for president. Early in the new millennium he curried political favor to impose a golf course on a pristine zone of coastal ecology that had been protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest. When local residents objected, his people employed heavy handed tactics to try and push them out of their homes. My outrage at the way an old woman was targeted, Molly Forbes, who lived alone with her budgerigar, drove me to write this poem drawing from quotations in the press and from the Bible. I see it as an act of liberation theology. An approach that, as the poem concludes, is as much concerned for the full humanization and liberation of the oppressor as it is for the oppressed.
But there is a postscript to all of this. Once The Donald ran for president, journalists and genealogists started digging up his Scottish ancestry. It turned out that his mother, Mary Anne Macleod, had been born eight miles from the village where I grew up on the Isle of Lewis. She emigrated from the island at a time of great suffering. One in five of the island’s young men had died in the Great War. That was followed by the Spanish Flu, a tuberculosis outbreak that was probably brought back from the war and which especially killed young people, and then mass emigration of the young. Out of an island of about 15,000 people, in 1923 alone one thousand of the young left for America. Most of them were men. Who were the women to marry? Little wonder that Mary Anne took the opportunity to follow her sister to America where she met and married Frederick Christ Trump, leaving the rest to become history.
Why did so many of the young of her generation emigrate? This is where the psychohistory of the Trump family gets really interesting. As I have shown (with the help of a Foreword by Brian D. McLaren) in the American edition of my recent book, Poacher’s Pilgrimage: an Island Journey, Mary Anne’s own maternal ancestors, like many other islanders, had been forced from their ancestral lands by rapacious landlords. The oppressed so easily become the oppressor, and that is part of the poorly understood trauma of our times and the reason why I wrote about the spiritual journey in Poacher’s.
When I was a youth, I used to be a pony boy on the deer cull in the south-east of our island. Recently I went back, and in the photograph with this article, there I am, with the keeper, looking down across the abandoned lands that Donald’s maternal ancestors had once farmed. As you wander about, you stumble upon the ruins of their homesteads in the heather. It’s all so very sad, and all so very important that when we talk about “Scots-Irish” culture amongst white people in America, we understand some of the suffering behind it. The same goes for many other ethnic identities, but The Donald is the one from my island, and he’s the one that’s standing larger than life in many people’s lives today. It hones an even sharper edge to my poem. This is about deep healing for us all.
Alastair McIntosh is a Scottish writer, academic, and activist. www.AlastairMcIntosh.com.
O Donald Trump, Woe Donald Trump
(First published by Bella Caledonia in November 2011)
Donald Trump is an American billionaire born of an exiled Hebridean mother. He plans to build “the world’s greatest golf course” and five hundred executive houses on a pristine beach near Aberdeen, previously viewed as a protected land. This bàrdachd arose from his attempts to evict an elderly woman who stands in his way. It is not an art poem. It is a bardic declamation coming out of a tradition that speaks social truth direct to power - hot, rough, and on the hoof.
O Donald Trump
It was my own old mother’s taxi driver
on the Isle of Lewis
who said he lives next
to your old mother’s house
on the Isle of Lewis
That made me think
how close we are
being separated by
just two mothers
and one Stornoway taxi
And got me thinking
of your visit to the Island
back in June 08
to your family croft home
Inside of which you stepped
(according to reports)
for fully ninety-eight seconds
And told the press
(with reference to
your true relations
which is to say
the Trump International Golf Links)
yes, told the press:
“I think this land is special.
I think Scotland is special,
and I wanted to do something special
for my mother”
To which the neighbours said:
“We never saw the likes of this in our lives”
“He’s had a lifetime to come here so why is he doing it now?”
“It’s a PR stunt …”
… because, as a former councillor elaborated
the place was being “… cynically manipulated”
and even your own cousin said
with classic Island understatement
(not passed on in your genetic strand):
“We’re happy to see him
although the visit
is very brief.”
O Donald Trump
it is not the press before you now
nor Island dignitaries nor even me …
I am but the scribe
moved by the land itself
that as you said “is special”
to raise my pen on its behalf
The Island too has got a voice
(though not a PR machine)
The Island too has got a view
upon the ways of such a son as you
The Island knows about your wealth
and what you did to get it
and hears you speak of Barron Trump
your own ten month wee son
paraded down the Walk of Fame
at Hollywood – you said:
“He’s strong, he’s smart, he’s tough, he’s vicious, he’s violent:
all of the ingredients you need to be an entrepreneur!”
We would have thought it in jest
were it not for the blood trail
of real estate … (who pays rent
and who collects?)
and the casinos …
(whose lives are spun on that roulette
both during hours, and after?)
The Trump World Tower
The Trump Star Tower
The Trump Elite Tower
The Trump Palace
The Trump Taj Mahal
and Trump Marina
far from the chip shops of Stornoway Harbour
And your name golden everywhere
hi-rise windows glittering
“with Viracon’s 24-karat gold-coated glass”
not from you “cold shoulder gold”
but, a Liquid Gold Bodywrap
with a 24 Karat Gold Facial
at the Trump Tower Spa
which according to publicity
(that surely speaks the Truth as much as you)
soothes away the wrinkles
by immersing crinkled body parts, I quote
“in pure gold minerals and Egyptian chamomile”
and “muscle soothing massage with oils
infused with golden particles,” and:
“to top off the opulent treatment
guests are dusted in shimmering,
iridescent gold powder”
… thereby offering
“… discerning spa guests
the ultimate combination
of optimal skin care
and guiltless decadence.”
O Donald Trump
of Midras hubris, Golden Calf and Babel Towers
who with your trumped up politicians
(a disappointment to our Scottish soil)
stand bunkered, as the prophets say
“convicted by their convictions”
or the deficit thereof
It is not I that prosecute
but the Island - of your mother and my youth
whose skeins of calcium and phosphorous
were knitted through our fledgling frames
from out of herring bones and sheep and milk and oats
You stand accused, Donald Trump
… Stand up before the Court!
the Island’s court
… of forcing golden facials
on nature’s long protected countenance
at Menie Links by Aberdeen
to make for tourist golf a course
with calls for airport fairways stretched
to fly the face of global climate change
To trumpet up a way of life
this world no longer can sustain
(for the Earth can no longer afford the rich)
To force your way bulldozered in
by forcing others out
although you hid the might of clout
and spun the spin which said:
“The Trump Organisation
has no Compulsory Purchase Order powers.”
You stand accused, Donald Trump
of seeking to evict
eighty-six year old Molly Forbes
and her son, and the budgie perched on her shoulder
who says about her place:
“I don’t want to sell it.
It is my paradise.
I want to live in it.
Why should some of those top knobs
in Government with their crooked ways
of claiming money
get legal aid
but I can’t?
I think I can’t get any
because I’m too honest.”
To which your sugared growlers say:
“It is regrettable that an elderly woman
Has been used to front
this frivolous court action.
There are consequences
for filing a baseless claim
and her son and lawyers
should pay the expenses.”
Oh really, Donald?
Consequences!
to seek protection from the law
of human rights
so not to be cleared out
from her own wee but and ben
for your greed, not need
with legal costs of up to 50k
more than she is maybe worth
but not as much as principle
(in case you fail to understand)
O, Donald Trump!
Woe, Donald Trump
… Woe … woe … woe …
There are “consequences” indeed
for what you do
The Island from within
sees the likes of you
The Island names, unmasks, engages with
the likes of you
who take its name in vain against the grain
The Island has a context
into which to place the likes of you
I quote, again
from the Island’s own … publicity:
“Woe to you, scribes … hypocrites!”
For ye devour widows’ houses…
For ye are like unto whitened sepulchres,
which indeed appear beautiful outward,
but are within full of dead men’s bones,
and of all uncleanness.”
Woe to you, Donald Trump:
“Woe unto them that add house to house,
that join field to field, until there is no more room,
and that ye dwell yourselves alone
in the midst of the land!”
Woe to you, Donald Trump, for:
“The Lord preserveth the strangers;
he relieveth the fatherless and widow:
but the way of the wicked
he turneth upside down.”
Woe, woe and three times, woe!
O, Donald Trump …
be not mistaken
The Island does not cast a curse
does not return the shameful act with evil eye
Sufficient that it just …
withdraws its blessing
T’is you who stand yourself accursed
and drains the flow of life …
the artery cut that curls and tightens
dreadful back upon itself
The Island stands not for a curse
but only to forgive
to draw back in its Prodigals
“not seven times” they say
“but seventy times seven times”
You told the world you loved this land
and wished your mother’s memory
(though naming your development
we have perforce observed
not after Mary Ann MacLeod
but after … Mr Trump)
Don’t make for her a bunker …
… from the plunder of another woman’s world
… from beauty’s desecration of true nature free and wild
… from climate change vainglorious in “guiltless decadence”
Come home, Donald …
Come home in your mind!
Come home to gentle honest folks!
Come home to nature’s guileless way!
without greed
without force
without tears
Renounce the rootless sands of capital and pride!
Renounce the decorated corpse of suppurating wealth!
Renounce those “vicious … violent” so-called winning ways!
… Come home, o Donald Trump, come home to this new start
… and build a golden Tower to be your greatest work of living art
… that rises from the fairway as the meteoric human heart
Transmuted … Transfigured … Transubstantiated
Come home, Donald …
just come on home
