"I saw Satan laughing with delight......"

In 1972 Don McLean released his iconic, and at over eight minutes long, epic, song “American Pie” (click on link below to watch McLean performing his epic in 1972). There have been many interpretations and suggestions as to the meaning of McLean’s words but what is not in doubt is that they struck a chord then, and still do today. The words and the “message” if there be a message suggest the demise or death of something of worth – many think it was the tragic early death of Buddy Holly and his music; others suggest the death of American innocence; maybe the death of the American dream, and some posit that the song is a paean or maybe a requiem to JFK and all that he represented to America and the world. Who knows? But whatever McLean’s intentions with his song, its message and theme have stuck – it still has huge popularity and resonates more today than ever before.

Amongst the most powerful words and metaphors in the song are these:

“……….. and as I watched him on the stage

My hands were clenched in fists of rage

No angel born in Hell

Could break that Satan spell

And as the flames climbed high into the night

To light the sacrificial rite

I saw Satan laughing with delight……..

……..And in the streets, the children screamed

The lovers cried and the poets dreamed

But not a word was spoken

The church bells all were broken

And the three men I admire most

The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost

They caught the last train for the coast

The day the music died…..”

McLean could have had no knowledge of what the future might bring but, I for one, cannot read or hear these words without thinking of America 2025 under the monstrous Trump and his grubby minions. “Satan laughing with delight" seems an apt metaphor for Trump, Vance and Musk – and the “good old boys" of the GOP. Nor can I see or hear the words without also seeing the face of Trump with his malevolent and malignant twisted grin seeming to personify George Orwell’s terrifying comment in his dystopian tale “1984” that “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face….” Is that America's future - and maybe the world? It's a terrifying thought but given the new world order promoted by Trump one that we must consider.

But what of those other words “And in the streets the children screamed…..”? America, allegedly a “Christian country,” seems to me and I think, many more, to be anything but. The perverted “Christianity” that I have witnessed spilling from the mouths of Trump supporters and the hateful legislation being enacted by Trump (abortion clamp downs, reducing social programmes, vilifying other human beings, hateful rhetoric……the list goes on) all strongly suggest to me that in Trump’s America, within the Republican Party, and in the minds of millions of moronic Trump supporters the Good Samaritan would get short shrift. In the transactional world of Trump, Vance and Musk nothing, not even kindness or Christian compassion or empathy, is free – we saw that in the Oval Office when President Zelenskyy visited - "I will only give you this if you give me that" underpins the new morality. The law of the jungle operates, dog eats dog, man eats man; the basic courtesies, dignities and humanities cease to exist, nothing is for free - the new "Christianity" of America is a post-humane society. The Good Samaritan when he found the injured traveller on the road didn’t look down at the injured man and say “You don’t have many good cards in your hand, Mister……so what’s in it for me if you want my help” as Donald Trump and JD Vance would undoubtedly have done. But, to return to McLean’s song, in America 2025 “The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost” truly have “Caught the last train for the coast".

America – and by association – the rest of the world has become in the last two months a terrifying place. French author and philosopher Albert Camus would have recognised what has happened in America since Trump’s Inauguration; “When a democracy is sick” warned Camus, “Fascism comes to its bedside, but it is not to inquire about its health.” Much of America 2025 cannot imagine anything better than their own perverted self indulgences. Shakespeare put it well when he reminded us in King Lear: “Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind”.

Indeed!

What Trump and the Republican Party have wrought in America is, as I suggested above, a post-humane society, They offer neither food nor drink — neither intellectual or spiritual consolation - to sustain the individual. the society or the soul. They lead nowhere and satisfy no ideal. They conform to no intellectual standard or any degree of civilisation which America might have achieved or prized. Trump has brought to Washington an anti-Camelot, an inversion of the mythical, majestic and virtuous citadel that became synonymous with Kennedy. While Kennedy inspired with his movie-star looks, his culture, his eloquence, his intelligence and his wit, Trump has turned all on its head. Trump was, and is, born from a culture that relentlessly deconstructs ideals; he sneers at the very notion of idealism or virtue or truth. In his embrace of wealth and power, Trump is enacting another ugly truth that today so much of America and its “culture” is rooted in lies, money, and corruption. The 19th and early 20th century’s ruthless multimillionaires, the “robber barons” – Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan and the rest - at least built museums, libraries, universities and hospitals to improve society’s lot. But they have now given way to ruthless multibillionaires - Trump, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg et al - who build nothing but Bitcoin server farms and space rockets to fulfil their own perverted self-indulgences.

Seven hundred years ago in Renaissance Italy Dante Alighieri wrote his “Commedia” (or “Divine Comedy” often commonly referred to as “Dante’s Inferno”) one of the world's most important and profound works – an epic poem leading us, in turn, through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise and emphasising the splendour and dignity of the human soul. In arguably the best known line in the work the Greek hero Ulysses, condemned to spending eternity in Hell, cries out “You were not made to live your lives as brutes,” and in doing so emphasises the importance of human potential for growth, learning, virtue and striving for something higher than mere animalistic existence. Dante would have recognised the brutality of Trump, his administration and America in 2025 for what they represent – to use Don McLean’s 1971 analogy “Satan laughing with delight”. Dante, however described Satan differently from McLean; he pictured “….a silent frozen Lucifer, eternally masticating the bodies of sinners with tears of ice on his cheeks”. Three hundred years later in England, poet John Milton saw a different Satan in his epic poem “Paradise Lost”; Milton’s vision was of a furious, manically talkative, feverishly resentful Satan. Both descriptions seem to me to sum up Donald Trump and his acolytes, men of no virtue, brutal and displaying the basest of animal instincts - inhumane, sub-human devoid of the very characteristics that define mankind.

Seventy years ago this year the great American novelist Jack Kerouac published his iconic and seminal work "On the Road" - a book that arguably changed the world (including me when I read it as a nineteen year old). In that book he posed the question "Whither goest thou America in thy shiny car in the night....". America and Americans need to ask that same hard question now in 2025. For just as McLean sang over half a century ago "Satan is laughing with delight" and as Dante’s writing suggested it is well on the pathway to Hell for it has lost its soul.