Good guy Sanders stood no chance against cunning Trump

HOW DID Donald Trump become president and not Bernie Sanders? Yes, there’s a new US president, a bull in a china shop, who ran the shrewdest campaign. Hilary Clinton wasn’t a match. Sanders could have been, in context.

We humans so easily become smug when we walk into glamour, then start claiming hero status, worshipping, as we accrue real power and keep banking buckets of glee money.

The power politicians had a long, successful run and the Martinis were spiked with gay laughter and dry cynical enterprise.

Down in the side streets where the well-to-do never dwell, bright lights became broken bulbs and cut-throat politics brutally ruled over hopeless, helpless people.

They, the American blue-collar workers, more so workless people, experienced for way too long the heartlessness of the upper classes, and they were numb as they watched the darkening of their skies.

And as their anger was unattended, smouldering, it kept swelling. They were ripe for whatever because with whatever there was nothing more to lose and perhaps something to gain. They were prone to a shrewd operator.

Two men finally entered the political fight to become president of America. A woman too. But she was as cold as arctic ice, harder than steel, and she wasn’t streetwise. She knew Washington, but she didn’t know the likes of Nebraska and others. They weren’t supposed to count. She could muster the vote of the in-crowd, the Ferrari people as they gathered that they, and she, would once again be invincible.

The Democrats that were supposed to have a heart for the losers in society brushed Sanders calculatingly aside.

Big Money knew that he would not be a groupie, so he was history. Sad, so sad, because he was the man that could and would bring millions of suffering people to vote Democrat.

Then the man, Trump, had his way.

So apt, his inaugural dance to Frank Sinatra’s song I Did It My Way.

That’s Trump, a ruthless and amoral businessman, but with a gift of sensing the gap. When you have made a few billion dollars and your ego is insatiably hungry, you might as well decide to become the president of your country because you know how the cookie crumbles.

He played the game to perfection. He tapped into the zeitgeist in America and he promised angry voters that all the bull **** would end. He tapped into the psyche of suffering people, most of them open to knee-jerk reactions against the strangely other, subconsciously opposed to everything different from their cultural upbringing.

Life is messy. In other parts of a suffering world where people are also in pain and angry, where despair is different but similar, they turn to violent ways and the pebble in bloody waters ripples out to far-off shores where complexity isn’t a daily difficult concept, where moral men and women sweat with ethics. A recipe for a world in trouble, and Trump is the man. The surrealist answer on American shores.

Let’s hold our hearts. An egotist that used his decades to enrich himself without any constraint, a man who lacks empathy but has the hunger to be a god in a godless world, might pray for the need to be in the hearts of admiring people. Yes, a realist, he’s only in pursuit of the hearts of the American people. The others he will have to ignore, to bury, in order to have a hope of home-ground respect.

Sanders would have been a president and would also have kept the well-being of dishevelled people in mind. The difference is that he would have kept them in his heart and soul too.

Sanders wasn’t on an ego trip. But a good guy didn’t stand a chance against the weird manipulating ways that superficial, shrewd people would run around him.

And now we, the world, are at huge risk. We are open to cowboy tactics and smoking guns.

I searched my bookshelves and got to the words of philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “the cunning of history”.

Perhaps, despite the ways of the unself-questioning pied pipers, the longing of a world yearning for a calm bay in life, might gather itself in this shameless mist to become human beings that will raise a hand of human companionship to all others. Human beings that will deem all far-off others as not merely off-shore and thus disposable enemies or rhetorically irrelevant to humaneness.

I will not walk hand in hand with bigots. I will not try to con my soul. It isn’t possible.

The human soul is much more than just baselessly me, me, and then some more me. Wim van der Walt Bellville