There has been a lot of scholarly writing about the archetype of the Wicked Stepmother in the tales of the Brothers Grimm over the years. Bruno Bettelheim suggested that having a stepmother wanting to kill her kids allowed children to separate their feelings, and preserve a pristine image of a good (usually dead) mother from the bad one. Also, having a wicked mother would be a little too on the nose (though John Frankenheimer certainly went there in the Manchurian Candidate!).

in the classic thriller, The Stepfather, a super bad new dad–played by Terry O’Quinn (aka, John Locke in Lost) in the original–literally sets out to kill his new children, after having done the same in an earlier family. He’s a classic sociopath, doing evil and moving on, unperturbed.

If every president deserves an archetype (George HW Bush was your first husband, Bill Clinton the guy your mother warned you about), Trump’s might just be the Wicked Stepfather. Sure, we couldn’t believe it when Mom brought this guy home–I mean, have you looked at him? The hair, the teeth, the way he talks about himself? And we could hardly stop barfing when she said she was going to marry him. But we couldn’t leave because, well, America is our home.

So we hoped he might pivot once he was our dad (even when we wouldn’t call him that) and hoped he would stop being such an asshole, or at least stop hitting on our girlfriends. But from the beginning, things looked bad. He spent his wedding toast talking about himself and then tried to scare everyone with talk about carnage. And he doesn’t even drink!

With the events of Charlottesville and his reaction, Trump has disappointed on a whole, new level. To follow my metaphor: It’s as if we came home from being beaten up or raped and our new stepdad said, “Well, who told you to go out there? and what were you wearing? There are two sides to this, you know. I don’t see that you are so blameless.” When what you wanted was a real dad, one who would try to comfort you and maybe even say, “Where is that son of a bitch, I’ll rip his head off!” Not, “He looks like a fine person to me!”

I don’t know how this horror show will end. But in the movie the kid finally kills the bastard.

A few years ago I interviewed a Buddhist teacher that I had come to admire. I’d heard this person give a number of dharma talks and liked the way he blended traditional Zen teachings with modern poetry and gleanings from other lineages. I asked him if I could interview him for a magazine devoted to Buddhism and he agreed. He wanted to know if he could see what I was going to publish before it went to press, and seeing how it was a Q&A, I didn’t see a problem. That was my first mistake.

All went well with our first interview. He was, not surprisingly, wise and funny about his past and what brought him to the place where he is now. The editors liked the interview but asked for more; they had questions about an old controversy at the center where he taught and wondered if he might address them. He was agreeable, when I finally reached him (corresponding with Buddhist monks can be a lesson in patience) and I showed him an edit of the first Q&A, which he seemed pleased with. I asked a few more questions, he gave me some good answers and I added them to the final piece, which the magazine rushed into print (though “rushed” is a relative term for any spiritual publication).

Then the teacher asked me if I could see the final version and I told him it was too late; they hadn’t even given me a chance to review it but presented the story to me in a PDF, fait accompli. Not that there was anything to complain about; it was a laudatory feature about a guy doing good work, illustrated with beautiful photos of him in nature. But when I told him that it was too late, but not to worry, he blew a gasket, called me “deceitful” and “manipulative” in an email–fighting words where I come from, and where he comes from, too. (He was raised in what we would today call a conflict zone.) I envisioned kicking the monk’s ass, which is definitely not the way I thought this assignment was going to turn out.

I still see this teacher occasionally, and while I admire his teachings, I’m aware that as a human being, he’s as fucked up as I am. I was reminded of this today when reading Jack Kornfield’s new book, No Time Like the Present. Not being up on my Buddhist gossip, I was surprised to learn that Jack had been divorced, after 30 years of marriage. I’ve heard him speak a number of times, have sat with him and read his books, and just assumed his life was perfect.

“I had to let it all be okay and realize that it does not define me,” he writes. “‘How could a teacher of mindfulness and lovingkindness be getting divorced?’ I was asked.

“Like a human being, that’s how.”

Reading that helped me let go of my still simmering resentment about the teacher I interviewed years ago. Now I have only a few thousand more resentments to go.