Wham, tan, thank you, ma'am

The truth we all need to face

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Ok, the time has come. We need to ask the question. No, not Greenland, Canada, Ukraine, war, peace, the future of Europe. I’m not saying these aren’t important questions, not least for the people they affect. (Which is all of us.) The question I want to ask today is: what’s with the orange face?

I used to like the colour orange. As a child, it made me think of läsk, the fizzy drink we used to get in Sweden on our summer holidays. Those were the days when we didn’t knock back negronis like there was no tomorrow. (Which there may not be.) They were the days when, at least for our family, a fizzy drink was a treat.

Once, on the ferry to Sweden, a man noticed our envious glances at his children gulping down whole bottles of Coca Cola, and asked our parents if he could buy us each a can. My father replied firmly that he could buy us one to share. We got one with three straws and sucked at them, greedily, like piglets gulping at their mother’s teat.

Orange drinks in England at that time were a bit disappointing. There was Kia-ora orange at the cinema, an expensive orange squash that tasted of chemicals. There was powdered orange juice (ditto), Fanta, which tasted of rust and, of course, Sunny Delight. It was only when I went on a camping trip to the South of France that I came across Orangina. Now that was more like it. It still makes me think of beaches, sunshine and “getting a tan”.

Oh yes, because that was a thing. That was, in fact, the point. Those of us who were unlucky enough to be born with the kind of pallid skin that makes people want to pack you off to a sanatorium at the top of a mountain spent a good chunk of our youth trying to coax our skins from, say, School House White to Oxford Stone. It was hard work. In England, Scotland and Wales it was a game of cat and mouse. Quick, quick, whip off your T-shirt, sun’s out, stick your face in it. Five minutes later, you’d be shivering under dark clouds. It might build character, this chasing after rainbows, it might build stamina, it might build resilience, it might build eternal gratitude for any glimpse of blue sky. What it doesn’t build is pigment that shifts the dial significantly from scholar-librarian to Baywatch babe.

All those years of ardous effort. But this, alas, isn’t me. Photo by Tomas Salas on Unsplash

We tried, my God, we tried. As soon as many of us were free to book our own holidays, we ditched the trips to National Trust houses and picnics in the rain for a two-week communion with sea and sand. By the end of it, we’d compare our shadow bikinis. The brighter the white, in contrast with the rest of us, the bigger the tick. We might be a bit mottled and blotchy, but at least for a few days when we got home people would say we looked “well”.

Those days seem distant now. Somewhere along the line, people started talking about skin cancer and the fashion faded, along with the tans. I still love to stick my face in the sun. To be honest, I only really like being outside when the sky is blue. But now, like many pale people, I’ll slather on the factor 50 and wear a sun hat. I have accepted, if not embraced, the just-about-bearable lightness of being wan.

The man in the White House clearly takes a different view. It’s strange because he seems very, very keen on the colour white. He spent a lot of money to get into that white house. He has spoken very highly of people who wear white robes and white pointy hats. He has got his colleagues removing from public record the names of distinguished people whose skins are not white. He’s deporting people who have committed no crime because their skins are not white. Unlike the French novelist Henry de Monterlanth, he thinks happiness writes white. He thinks might is right and so is white.

And yet he paints his face orange.

This is his official inaugural portrait by Daniel Torok. I haven’t tinkered with the colour.

There are many things I would like to ask him if I met him. I would like to ask him why he wants to gobble up countries like Doritos. (Which, by the way, are a very bright orange indeed. I know because I like them a lot and I eat them a lot. Perhaps that’s something the man at the White House and I have in common?) I would not expect a clear answer to my question, or at least not one that could be presented as the kind of argument you might expect an elected official to make. My guess is that he does think countries are like Doritos. One is never enough. You have to eat the whole pack.

I would like to ask him why he wants to blow up the global economy and do his best to bankrupt Canada and Europe. But again, I don’t think I would get an answer that I could put in a course on political theory, if I taught such things, which I don’t. I think the answer I would get would be something along these lines. It’s fun. Whoosh! Watch it blow up! See the sparks! Did you see who did that? I did that! Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Now you see it, now you don’t!

So I don’t think I would waste my time asking him questions like this. I would instead ask him the question we all want to know. What is the point of the orange face? What does he put on it? Where does he buy it? Does it wash off and, if so, does that make him happy or sad? Does he use Garnier Micellar Cleansing Water, like me? Does the orange stuff clog up his pores? Does Melania ever watch him put it on? Is Melania, in fact, ever near him, except when he’s being sworn in as President? Is it true that he puts on more of the orange stuff when he’s feeling stressed? Does it mean he wants to invade another country? Does he wear the orange stuff in bed?

And there, I want to draw the veil. I really, really don’t want to know what Donald Trump does in bed.

I suppose the key question I would want to ask Donald Trump, is: does he think the orange stuff makes him look better? And if so, better than what?

Does he, for example, think it makes him look better than Hitler, who loved his little toothbrush moustache? People might have thought that moustache was a little bit strange at first, but they got used to it, just as they got used to a lot of other things. It was a shame he picked that style of moustache for his signature look because the person who was most famous for it before was Charlie Chaplin, who was a genius, which Hitler was not. I wonder if the people around Hitler said things like: that’s a lovely moustache. And what a good idea to gobble up another country. And those watchtowers are looking great. I don’t know if they felt it was appropriate to comment on his appearance. I do know that he had a nice leather vanity set with silver-handled combs with fine ivory teeth.

Putin fishing in Tuva. Amazing that there was a photographer nearby! He’s wearing a crucifix because he’s a very pious man.

Does Trump think the orange face makes him look better than Putin, who is, let’s face it, a little bit pasty? Does he think the orange face makes up for the muscles, or rather lack of them? We know that Trump likes to be carted around in a little buggy when he plays golf, whereas Putin likes to catch lions with his bare hands. Or at least he likes to have a naked torso when he goes fishing and when there just happen to be cameras nearby. Does Trump dream of stroking those muscles and that naked torso? Is that why he’s so nice to Vladimir Putin? Is that why he wants to shower him with minerals, countries and wealth?

What I really want to ask Trump, of course, is what’s behind the orange face? If it’s a mask, what is it masking? If it’s a play, what’s the plot? What’s the game? What’s the song? What’s the dance?

There’s a part of me that really wants to know: what’s going on in that brain and in that heart? What is worth so much that it’s worth blowing up the world for? What exactly is the point?

The trouble is: I think I have the answer. There isn’t one. It’s all just noise. It’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying sweet FA. Behind that amber mask, there’s just a vast, echoing, hungry void. Only history will tell us what it sucks in.

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