Tuesday, March 07, 2017

What Is It But A Dream?

Each day we spend on this side of the Looking Glass makes all that is absurd more and more recognizable but no more absurd. The King of Tweet Tarts announced in his own highly imitable style that Barack Obama had the phones in his offices tapped in the weeks leading up to the election. "How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!" Bad or sick guy, but our forty-fourth president would probably check his spelling before delivering a rant with little or no basis in fact. Check that. He would probably not have used social media to announce his claims, and as President of the United States, he would have had some shred of evidence to toss in front of his barrage.
No. Check that again. He wouldn't have popped off for the obvious purpose of deflecting the country's continuing lurid fascination with all things distrumpian. If Richard Nixon became more paranoid and schizophrenic as his two terms in office continued, Donald Jehoshaphat Trump showed up in full-on bunker mode. If you missed the sputtering and spittle last week when he got up in front of Congress, you didn't have to wait long for its return.
Which leaves us all in this place where we don't really want to be. No one seems to know what or whom his next target will be. When he stops reaching for his "smartphone" at three in the morning and starts punching in launch codes, we're all going to wish that something else would have occurred back in October. I remember back in 2000, when so many of us clung to the belief that an investigation or a Supreme Court decision would set things right. Al Gore, Inventor of the Internet, would have been able to avert September 11 and the housing crisis. We would all be driving electric cars and luxuriating in the wealth redistributed the the social and economic reforms President Gore would most surely have enacted. 
Sixteen years later, I hear many of the same voices hoping for some rescue from the reality in which we find ourselves, when the most obvious one was there all the time: Vote. Vote as if your life depended on it, since it turns out that it just might be the case. Unless someone is able to grab hold of the Orange King and shake him, in hopes of turning him back into the little gray kitten he truly is. 

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