What Trump Did Not Know: Peeling Onions (I of III)

Some works of art simply beg to be stolen and then shared with a wider public. Great masterpieces should not languish in a basement, as it were.

The same goes for good stories like the one I am sharing here.

Stealing, in this case, is a rather simple affair. A bit of cutting, pasting, and transcribing audio to words? Easy. Done. All taken from this YouTube clip.

Disseminating this gem of a story to a wider audience is the harder task. I have no "bully pulpit" with this blog. The nations do not gather at my URL.

And yet I feel compelled to give it vent. Share it all the same. A beautiful song, sung into the void is still beautiful. In this case, I'm repeating someone else's song. It hasn't been heard much, and the clip may go away. And many people don't have 30 minutes to spare. So I sing, into the void, a shorter version of it.

The song begins with this prologue. The set up of the story.

Anna O'Connor, the speaker's daughter, died four years ago. She died young. Of cancer. But the combination of her stunning beauty and her rare form of cancer seem to have brought her to the attention of "the beautiful people", as they call them.

One in particular, billionaire Teddy Forstmann, seems to have been the catalyst. As I review the Wikipedia article on this billionaire, I can see why. He, too, was stricken with cancer. He died a few months before Anna did.

But before he died, Teddy took Anna to many exotic places (I'm guessing they were all cancer charity events), and Anna found herself in the company of a host of famous individuals. I won't recite them all here, but only note the few that are key to this abridged telling of O'Connor's story.

First, a picture of Anna, taken by Gilles Bensimon, former International Creative Director of Elle Magazine. He took one look at Anna and decided a shoot was in order. It's not hard to see why.

For sheer, simple beauty, Anna is Marilyn Monroe's match.

Moving on, we pick up the story where Dr. O'Connor notes with glee, "Here's Anna with the next president of the United States..."

O'Connor stammers on, "... Is that allowed? Can I say that? Oh, I'm sorry, that must be the wrong slide. Here's Anna with the next president..."

O'Connor then adds a bit of astute political commentary: "I'm sorry this is so depressing! Am I right? Oh my gosh... what happened there?"

(The immortalized words of Buck Dharma in the I Could Have Used A Little More Cowbell SNL skit come to my mind: "He speaks for all of us!")

But here's the portion of O'Connor's story that I'm getting us to.

When Trump met Anna, he blurted out, "Wow, this one's beautiful."

But as O'Connor notes about Trump, "There was something he just... didn't know. So I suppose that will surprise some of you..."

[Crescendoing laughter, as the audience picks up on this dig...]

O'Connor continues, "Although on the surface, she appeared beautiful. I'm her father, I think I can say that. But not far below, she was a real mess. Her beauty, we might say, was only skin deep. So we'll call these scans...

This is where the onion peeling begins in seriousness. Anna O'Connor. Marilyn Monroe. To Trump? The situation is a draw. Both are beautiful women, and for his sexual purposes, both equally delightful.

What Trump cannot understand is that both women were, beneath the skin, rotting. But this is no tie race. No.

Here is where Anna pulls away from iconic Marilyn in this race of beauty.

No slam on Marilyn, here. I obviously didn't know her. But her life was a mess.

Anna, on the other hand, had only rotting flesh beneath her beautiful skin.

How ironic. It turns out that Trump was, in the final analysis, right.

Very, very right.

The onion, friends, has another layer to peel. On the surface? Beautiful. Below the skin, not so much. But peel one more layer and we find that Trump's analysis is (accidentally) spot on.

"Wow, this one's beautiful."

Why? As O'Connor shares, and the 30 minutes are well spent listening, Anna wanted to let God have his way in her life, and it didn't have to be according to her own terms.

That is not the picture of a girl's dream life. That's a young woman dying.

Why the smile? Well, she knew what Jesus knew. And what was that?

Confused yet? Watch the YouTube clip. But in this shorter MTV version? Jesus knew he would soon die. And it wouldn't be fair.

Jesus was able to do something beautiful because he trusted the Father with "the bad news" and embraced what God could do with such materials.

It was Jesus' faithful walk to the cross that changed the world.

But the offer is extended not only to Jesus. We too can do beautiful things with our suffering. Even now, four years later, I'm moved by Anna, a woman who also embraced her via dolorosa with an inner grace that far exceeded her natural beauty.

What an appropriate picture to lead me into the season of Lent.

Thank you, Dr. O'Connor. Thank you, Jesus.

I cannot end this reflection any better than with O'Connor's own words regarding his daughter Anna: "So we might say that just below the skin, it was a real mess, but deeper still there was a real beauty."

To be continued...