Boot in the face

“For the last time, I want to say it plain: Trump is unfit to be president. He lies. He cheats. He’s a bad businessman and a bad American. He’s a bully who keeps score and you shouldn’t trust him around your teenage daughter, much less the nuclear football.

“If you support him out of fear, you should be ashamed, for nothing noble is ever achieved from fear. If you honestly believe that for all his flaws and lies and craven advantage-taking he still represents the best way forward for this nation, then I can do nothing for you, son. The propaganda worked on you. Lee Atwater—I hope to God in heaven—is weeping because his plans worked too well.”

— this column, Nov. 8, 2016

Four years ago, I wrote I had a “bad feeling” about the impending election. I didn’t predict that Donald Trump would be elected; just worried he might be.

Intellectually, I thought that in 2016 we would elect a firewall candidate, a placeholder president who would maintain the status quo. I wasn’t excited about the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency, but tend not to get excited about political figures. I’ve seen a lot of them up close and personal, seen them behave badly around their staff and had them mistake me for the help.

I had a U.S. senator snap his fingers at me and tell me to run go get him a couple of hot dogs. I complied, then produced my notebook.

Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are decent guys, but all of them did things in office that horrified me. Every world leader and city council person are politically expedient; they dissemble and rationalize and try to disguise their genuine motives.

My default mode is to think everyone who seeks public office is suspect. I wonder if there’s not something wrong with them, that they feel the need to pursue power and attention. They are necessary, but I completely reject the myth that they are of superior character and ability. That I can admire a few of them only strengthens the argument that they are by and large ordinary people, not the worthies they hold themselves out to be. Their motivations are no finer than our own; they check their accounts and count their pennies and accept the perks of privilege as their due.

I always vote, but seldom with enthusiasm. We are always trying to mitigate the damage that the vain and over-confident might wreak.

What broke my heart four years ago was not the behavior of Donald Trump, who after all was just staying on brand, or even the cravenness of the professional politicians—the enablers and the lackeys, for they were born to be enablers and lackeys, you can see it in their pageant smiles, their dead and shifting eyes—but the foolishness of the American people.

I did not believe so many of us were so damaged that we could ignore basic precepts of decency and reward an empty man whose only perceptible talent is for evading accountability. I just thought we were better than that; that most of my friends and neighbors would recognize pro wrasslin’ kayfabe for what it was.

But I had uncles who thought pro wrasslin’ was real, and have heard learned people say what’s real doesn’t matter. Or that there’s nothing realer than money and a man’s a fool who entertains an altruistic impulse. That at the end of every fork it’s all transactional, and we only cover for our avarice with pretty words.

Still, I thought that enough of you, when you got in that booth, all by yourself, with only that small still voice within, would do the grown-up thing. I thought we were better than this, and that is my failing. I should have known that most of us are scared most of the time of people we don’t know and what may come, and that expressions of loud certainty play well in a world that’s impossibly convoluted and gray.

Sometimes we want the clarity that comes with jackboots. We want the daddy who will save us all, so long as we are loyal. We would trade liberty for security, we would look past the pain of others to bask in the glow of our screens, which allow us the illusion of agency. Put on a red or blue hat, watch Maddow or Tucker or Hannity, pretend to be engaged in the business of our time; pretend to be part of this history.

Sylvia Plath observed how some of us can adore the fascist, “the boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you.” We look to politics for entertainment, for sensation, for a reason to feel energized or persecuted or part of some club. We’re pathetic, a sad slumping tribe of inchoate avengers, ready to recite the talking points delivered by our telegenic mascots.

I’m an elitist jerk about this stuff, but if you’re getting your news from the TV, you’re not well informed. You’re at best getting a “for dummies” version that’s been tailored to flatter your self-image and string you along with little doses of dopamine. John Prine had it right in the ’70s—blow up your TV.

Politics isn’t entertainment, and the minute somebody opens their mouth to report what Hannity or Tucker or Maddow said on TV last night, there’s a little warning light that ticks on in my head, indicating I might not be talking to a serious person.

But I feel better when I talk to my neighbors, even those who put signs in their yards and stickers on their bumpers. I feel better when hearing about the people who have waited in lines for hours to vote. In a season when efforts at voter suppression have been more overt than they have in decades, we’re looking at a record turnout.

Perhaps it is naive, but I still believe the Supreme Court will resist becoming a partisan tool and overturning the forcefully expressed will of the American people.

In any case, we have made it through these four years, and if it happens again it happens again— I’ve never subscribed to the idea that America was better than its actions anyway. It’s easy to have the ideals, it’s something else to live up to them. At least there are people willing to interrogate the assumption of American exceptionalism; at least there are people who desperately wish to make America great again.

But before we can be great we must be decent. We must conduct a moral inventory. We have to grow up and understand that the universe does not yield to our wishfulness. Maybe the last four years, and more than 225,000 deaths, have taught us that.