Ozymandias in Atlantic City

or, America's Rasputin and the nightmare that won't end

i.

(from 2019)

Like virtually every aspect of all-things Trump, he (and the damage he’s wrought) manages to be beyond satire, beyond fiction, and even the real time (fake news?) accounts strain credulity.

This piece, from The Guardian, about Brian Rose’s Atlantic City, is instructive, appalling, and depressing.

It’s not merely the decades-long Trump scam redux, it’s a succinct expose of America’s obsession with wealth (the attainment of it, the proliferation of it, the possibility of it), and how consistently our media has done the dirty and disgusting work of elevating these sociopaths and hucksters.

Look: the fact that Trump repeatedly stiffed contractors should have made him a public joke beyond redemption (not to mention criminally liable, another case study of how wealth forever insulates white collar cretins) many years before the same imbecile who managed to bankrupt a casino (!) became a reality TV mega-star.

I know I’m not alone in being often flummoxed but also awed by the Trump trajectory: as a writer, it would never occur to me to think a satirical tale about America’s peculiar psychosis regarding celebrity worship could ever conceivably involve a thrice-married dirtbag being embraced by the Evangelical community (not to mention a demonstrable unfamiliarity with biblical text, the bare minimum qualification for Elmer Gantry wannabes less than a generation ago), a fat fast-food devouring slob with a hideous combover and perma-tan regarded as an Alpha Male, a semi-literate quisling who orders his grade-D steaks well-done (actually, this last one, sadly, makes perfect sense), a creep who fetishizes his own daughter, and, it must be repeated, a charlatan who perpetually refused to pay the (blue collar!) workers who helped construct his shitty properties…

I also know I’m not alone in looking at the picture above—all of this and more reduced to one image—and thought of how there’s nothing new under the sun.

Or, as this guy put it:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Shelley’s masterpiece was, of course, used to appropriate and delicious effect toward the end of Breaking Bad:

ii.

(from 2023)

I’ve only been to Atlantic City one time (friend’s bachelor party, obvi) and, admittedly, not being a gambler or fan of rooms thick with cigarette smoke (circa 2002), and loathing all aspects of Donald Trump way before it was fashionable, I was underwhelmed. Or, it was exactly what I expected, only more so.

What struck me, as we drove toward the hideous cardboard cut out casino, was how truly run down and sketchy the immediate blocks were: boarded up houses, unreconstructed edifices, and trash everywhere. It looked and smelled like what it was: a desperate shell of a city that had been strafed by the twin-killers Greed and Indifference. It was too easy a metaphor on too many levels; a place of suffering and neglect with an inverse Oz of boardwalk-fronting fake castles where people went to spend and lose money — late capitalism redux.

I’m not sure if I knew, then, that the board game Monopoly is based on properties all around Atlantic City (which has had many different lives, which you can Google, but I also defer to the immortal if overlooked movie Atlantic City where Burt Lancaster shines as a semi-retired has-been and a young-ish Susan Sarandon does things with lemons, and also one of the best essays I’ve ever read, John McPhee’s “The Search for Marvin Gardens.” There’s also The King of Marvin Gardens, a half-baked exercise in what could-have-been if fully formed and executed, a curious if inevitable let-down from Bob Rafelson who was following up one of the great movies of the ’70s, Five Easy Pieces (my tribute to that masterpiece here). And, not least nor last, The Boss hit a grand slam in under 5 minutes with “Atlantic City,” but the entirety of Nebraska explores the desolation of both a country and the forces that enabled the bad guys to permanently stack the deck. More on that, here.)

This poem was boiling around in my brain for a long time, but I think it was reading about a coffee table book (Brian Rose’s Atlantic City) featuring pics of AC (and the inextricable association of AC and DJT, and the readymade ways his feckless annihilation of its potential served/serves as Exhibit A for how wealthy people invariably set the world on fire, for profit, and leave countless lives in a smoldering, ignored heap), and being reminded that, if American journalism hadn’t sadly become access-only exercise for clicks (capitalism, again) and InfoTainment hadn’t had whatever was left of its soul exorcised for reality TV empire tilting, the embarrassment of Donald Trump would have been relegated to the ash heap of history as a punchline and cautionary tale decades before he descended that faux-gold escalator to carry America into the sewage from which he sprung (A great deal more, from me, on that, here).

McPhee beat me to Marvin Gardens as metaphor, but when I learned that St. James is the patron saint of laborers (and suffering in general) something finally clicked. Here’s my poetic meditation on The American Dream via Atlantic City, with as many Monopoly references as I could squeeze in. Huge gratitude, as always, to The Decadent Review, for not only publishing my work, but providing a gorgeous aesthetic (as always, I encourage you to support our independent literary magazines and read / donate, and spread the word for the amazing work they do on behalf of art).

St. James’s Place*

Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance.

--Romans 5:3

This city on the sea, reincarnated like a borrowed life: Babylon

redeemed by way of junk bonds, the world’s eighth wonder—

according to He-Who-Didn’t-Compensate-His-Contractors, busy

building anything but wealth, born off Broadway, blue-blooded

and blind to any colors on the wrong side of the strip: his palace,

courtesy of the Community Chest, all faux gold & laundered bills.

Here hotels were built and then abandoned, blithely named after

barons whose fortunes came and went—like trains moving money

and tourists from the boardwalk to more secure settlements

the salted waves won’t reach: their utilities of inherited wealth

conceiving wholly new empires that extended from the ocean

to outer space, fresh time capsules incorruptible by commerce.

Casinos thrive as micro-monopolies: the rigged arenas of dreams

where gladiators die nightly, leaving emptied wallets in sad piles,

like so many bandages on a battlefield, these personal lotteries lost

one slow suicide at a time; the city finally a reflection of the system

it was built to sell, where fortunes are amassed faster than paychecks,

dynasties erected like pyramids, and the stock market is scientific fact.

This impossible promise ruined, patrolled now by cops & cab drivers;

pushers and pimps role-playing tokens, the forsaken streets creeping

with orphaned dogs amidst smoked out bars and boarded up buildings:

dinosaurs unaware the comet was coming, like some divine justice—

finally—as if Christ returned to the money taker’s temple, flipping over

every blackjack table and consigning sweaty pit bosses to eternal fire.

Churches and funerals homes remain in business, starving with vacancies

for the converted or deceased as the least of our brothers, now ghosts,

cover the waterfront while mothers and sisters bear the burdens and babies,

keeping stillborn bloodlines from extinction, and silence herself gives last call

as the Eye in the Sky smiles down on James—patron saint of all who suffer—

reconciled to his place and begging forgiveness for those that trespass.

(*The properties in the board game Monopoly are named after streets in Atlantic City, N.J., famous in the early 20^thCentury for its beach and boardwalk. The tourist town eventually declined, and gambling was legalized in 1976, followed by high rises and casinos, several owned by real estate tycoon Donald Trump, who declared A.C. the eighth wonder of the world.)