THE TRUMP DIARIES: Day 74, The Fun Starts

In a pivotal scene in, “Goodfellas,” Martin Scorsese’s paean to urban tragedy, and what the perceived loss of identity can do to a young man, he has us in a bar downtown. Mobsters are laughing and drinking, in beautiful suits and hair that literally dazzles. The world is their oyster, so to speak, and what they want, they grab it.

It’s very appealing to allow anger, vigor, pursuit, and sexuality to surmount the essential crisis of these men. They have a loss of Catholic faith, they aren’t their parents’ generation, there is no continuity in their lives. They feel as if they have betrayed the beliefs of their ancestors. Which, in fact, they have due to their embrace of modernity and its very access, which was denied to the Italian men in America before them.

So they turn that betrayal, insecurity, and most profound isolation into sheer, exhilirating, hilarious rage:

Tommy DeVito: You mean, let me understand this cause, ya know maybe it’s me, I’m a little fucked up maybe, but I’m funny how, I mean funny like I’m a clown, I amuse you? I make you laugh, I’m here to fuckin’ amuse you? What do you mean funny, funny how? How am I funny?

Henry Hill: Just… you know, how you tell the story, what?

Tommy DeVito: No, no, I don’t know, you said it. How do I know? You said I’m funny. How the fuck am I funny, what the fuck is so funny about me? Tell me, tell me what’s funny!

That’s where we are at today, that’s what this Inauguration ushers in.