There’s a scene near the end of the Beethoven biopic “Immortal Beloved” where joy emerges not so much as a final coda but as an emotional lifeline, a brief escape from harsh reality.
By the time he wrote Ode to Joy, the fourth and final movement of his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven was functionally deaf, a memento left from a brutal childhood. Despite his genius, Beethoven in his advanced years was a tormented, lonely man, relatively impoverished and cut off from the world. It was in this harrowing, broken state that he wrote Ode to Joy.
In the movie scene, as his Ninth Symphony premieres at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna in 1824, the camera leaves the orchestra hall and pulls back to Beethoven as a young boy. The scene shows him climbing out of his bedroom window onto the roof to escape a drunk father looking for his whipping post. Beethoven slides down the roof while his father yells, then runs with abandon. He runs and runs, the music climbing to crescendo, until he reaches a silent, inky black lake holding a skyful of stars.
When he finally slips into the black water and floats on his back, his abusive father howling in the distance, the chorus explodes in Ode to Joy: words of universal brotherhood, freedom, joy, and the unity of mankind. (“Freude, schöner Götterfunken,— Joy, fair spark of the gods…”)
Cradled between inky water below and night sky stars above, Beethoven couldn’t hear his abuser’s calls. He knew he was still out there, wielding his club, but it didn’t matter. The boy had found an untouchable moment of transcendent joy.
That’s how it felt to wake up Wednesday morning.
The abuser remains
Democracy, like Beethoven, has outrun her tormentor. For now. International headlines Wednesday morning, along with nationwide vote counts, celebrated the fact that despite harsh odds, democracy managed to fight off her attacker. Her abuser and his well-funded club are still lurking there, menacing and waiting, but for now she’s escaped his reach.
The midterms were never about red vs. blue, right vs. left. They were about greed, and how the nation’s richest 1% have been allowed, under Trump, to divide our nation’s assets among themselves while the rest of us go without. The onslaught of abuse at Trump’s hand was too exhausting to follow. Trump’s cacophony of illiberal fronts — Steve Bannon’s flood the zone theory — was so persistent, so multi-tendrilled, it was folly to try.
Americans have suffered mightily under a criminal president who destroyed the White House, started a war in Iran he can’t win, stole billions for himself, his family, and his donors, threw brown people into concentration camps, threw millions of Americans off their health care, kidnapped Venezuela’s president and stole their oil, and committed war crimes in South America, then posted snuff videos to brag about it.
Trump Republicans embraced corruption, empowered a secret police state, empaneled a mob boss lawyer as attorney general, and rolled out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin, even as he is aiding Iran. To say nothing of our economy, now in a freefall of Trump’s own making.
Unintended history lessons of the Trump years
The Trump years have been an education, an unwanted lesson in how fragile democracy truly is. America was founded on an idea, a simple but novel leap of faith that men could govern themselves. The flawed men who wrote the Constitution had just escaped a tormentor of their own. King George III taxed starving colonists to help pay for Britain’s wars; he punished dissent and flexed power to show that he could. When they wrote the Declaration of Independence, Revolutionary War instigators started with a list of grievances, a litany of “repeated injuries and usurpations” that Britain had used to make their desperate lives even harder.
In the 1700s, the world still operated under the assumption that kings were anointed by God; their “divine rights” translated into unquestioned power. It’s not hard to see how ‘divine’ authority leads to gross inequality, cruelty and suffering for the governed; that understanding fuels the fiercest rejection of Christian Nationalism and Trump’s attempts to arrogate divine power for himself.
Our founders were the first to reject that assumption. They presented only an untested theory to the world to take its place: that all men were created equal and were entitled to the same pursuit of happiness. Steeped in the conviction that it could be done, they hammered out an extremely sophisticated roadmap of balanced and shared powers strictly governed by the rule of law, not a king.
Ours has never been a perfect system, and some of our early goals still remain miles away. But until Trump, at least we continued to embrace our ideals and pursue those goals. Enter Trump, who rewrote 250 years of history in an attempt to subvert the rule of law into whatever Trump said it was. His staggering corruption and lawless, unchecked cruelty yanked us back nearly full circle to rule by king and not of law.
America educated herself
The most angst-producing part of watching Trump’s mounting acts of cruelty, malfeasance and incompetence was wondering whether Americans were even paying attention. Fox News continues to lie to 38% of us; the rest of mainstream media, now owned by Trump donors, sugarcoats Trump’s worst instincts.
It became clear on Tuesday that, despite the right-wing media landscape, voters were, indeed, paying attention.
There’s miles and years to go to unravel Trump’s trail of destruction: millions of Americans are now without healthcare, ICE is out of control, the war in Iran is intractable, the national debt is unsustainable, climate change is accelerating, interest rates are climbing, and 80% of federal agencies — including education, FEMA, the DOJ, and the EPA — must be rebuilt, putting a pin for now in holding to account all the criminals who made it happen.
But I’m not ready to argue about priorities. Not just yet. I want to float on my back and stare at the night sky, unable to hear our barking tormentor. I want to embrace that we are made up of the same constituent components as the stars, which makes men like Trump irrelevant, for just another day.
Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.