It's been almost 10 years since that man rode the golden escalator down to the awaiting commoners to announce that he was running for President of the United States and I still can't get my mind around it.
Realizing that he would be the most destructive and divisive president in modern American history, I came to grips with the possibility of his election in 2015, because he was the new thing, and Americans love a new thing. The desire for change is a powerful force. So they voted for a lying, gutter-talking, sex offending (on tape), draft-dodging, tax-cheating, pseudo-celebrity businessman, with a record of bankruptcies, stiffing suppliers, and conning customers, and who never did a day of public service in his life.
But it's 2024 now. Haven't we had enough of his chaos and innumerable outlandish lies? After all, it's post pandemic debacle, in which over a million Americans perished (by many estimates, half needlessly), post two impeachments, post January 6th in which he fomented a violent insurrection against the Capitol and attempted a government coup, post stealing classified documents, post 36 felony convictions for covering up his affair with a porn actress, and, and... I haven't even mentioned post stripping away women's reproductive freedom by a Supreme Court he appointed.
And this race is still neck and neck? Within the statistical margin of error? Is there nothing that disqualifies a person from becoming the President of the United States? Tax evasion? Bankruptcy? Adultery? A criminal record? Insurrection? I mean he's running while out on bail.
But all this doesn't actually say much about the candidate. It says much more about the electorate.
As I've mentioned before, I started reading Allan Bloom's 1988 book The Closing of the American Mind to try and understand how our standards have sunk so low during my lifetime. I sensed that the story begins way back, around the time I was born in '64, and came to fruition around the time I graduated university in '86, which is exactly the period that Bloom writes about. This is from a chapter in the last quarter of the book: "The professors, the repositories of our best traditions and highest intellectual aspirations, were fawning over what was nothing better than rabble; publicly confessing their guilt and apologizing for not having understood the most important moral issues, the proper response they were learning from the mob; expressing their willingness to change the university goals and the content of what they taught." You'd be forgiven if you thought he was describing the way universities (mis)handled, actually tolerated, the anti-Semitic and destructive pro-Palestine encampments on the university campuses this past year. Actually, he was writing about a chaotic 1968 civil rights demonstration at Cornell that he witnessed.
Reading Bloom made me realize something. We've been primed for a candidate like the Monster From Mar-a-lago for at least 50 years. I realized that this candidate isn't an anomaly. We've been creating him for decades. He's a composite, a political Frankenstein that we've stitched together from the unsavoury and unseemly characteristics of almost every president we've had since LBJ, just more so. Think about it. He is corrupt like Nixon, contrived like Reagan, adulterous like Clinton, clueless and inarticulate like Dubya, and inexperienced like Obama. Left off this list are Ford, Carter and GHW Bush. And that's because they are the exceptions that prove the rule. They were decent, honest, and forthright presidents. They paid their taxes, served their country honourably in war, and ran scandal free administrations. And they were all one term presidents. In other words they weren't really presidential material, at least not in the way my generation seems to prefer occupants of the Oval Office.
I guess we'll see soon enough if standards have changed. The debate looms and the thought of the deformed ugly creature of our making once again standing behind a podium and being respectfully asked serious questions that concern all of us, as if a genuine answer can be reasonably expected, is to my mind an indictment. But not of the politician. The monster was never the creature, it was always his creator.
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