Maybe I should have waited till January, but then again maybe I’ll change the theme again then. But I was starting to get bored with the old one and decided that–because I’m older now, but why that should matter I don’t know–it was time for a new look. This one has sliding images on the header. I grabbed a couple at random but I’ll likely change those at some point.
This has been a fascinating year. My boss asked me–because I’m older–if I’d ever witnessed an election cycle this bizarre.
No.
Contentious, yes. Clownish, surreal, weird–no. It’s been suggested that you’d have to go back to Lincoln’s election to find one even close to this in unpredictably oddball strangeness, and that’s a good contender, what with the near-demise of the Democratic Party as it split into three smaller parties, the Know Nothings, variations of fence-sitters, nativist groups, and the odd prediction of the apocalypse. Note that the Democratic Party of that time would have been the functional equivalent–even the philosophical equivalent–of the current Republican Party.
1968 was the first presidential year in which I had any kind of political awareness, and that was a bad one. We had Wallace running a third party ticket based on the assertion that there was no real difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties (it would end up being a race between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, after an assassination and a steamroll over McGovern), but he himself was a nativist bigot who would most closely resemble the governor of Maine these days.
Nixon won on the promise of ending the Vietnam War (he didn’t, at least not fast enough for most of the country) and to “bring us together again”–which he also didn’t because he turned out to be a paranoid misanthrope. I wonder how many people who had voted for him wished they’d gone with Humphrey, even though he had some baggage as well. In 1972, Nixon was challenged by Edmund Muskie, who was a decent man who might have turned the country around, but the RNC ran a smear campaign highlighting his wife’s problems with depression. As I say, Muskie was a decent man and withdrew rather than put his family through what he correctly perceived as a new level of nastiness. You can probably trace it from there how our campaigns have become obsessed with the personal and have lost all sense of decency and decorum. Carter may well have been our last decent president from the old school of national politics.
It is possible, though I do not expect it, that we may be able to alter the way we conduct politics. It has reached a new low this time with a candidate who embodies all the worst aspects of the vulgar side of the American character. People support him because they are getting off on being able to be rude, sexist, racist, and basically what they mistakenly see as open and honest. Trump has elevated the idea that trash sitcoms are the highest form of national philosophy. He’s a one-man roadshow based on Three and a Half Men and Sh*t My Dad Says.
And we have come to see what happens when people decide they have “won” the field and go home. I’ll leave everyone to sort out who I’m talking about. I’ll add that clearly the mean-spirited, compulsively frightened element of the Far Right were the ones who did NOT go home and today we see the results of their taking the field. The Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, Alex Jones, Breitbart, Limbaugh…
I’ve unfriended a few people on Facebook over this. First time since I’ve been on it I have preemptively done so, because I just get so weary of the mindless toxicity that shows up on my feed from them. One in particular galled me by completely failing to make a distinction between fiction and personal opinion. Maybe all of them, but one in particular decided that since J. K. Rowling had written about ugly things she had no standing to condemn the ugliness in real life.
I suppose one of the things that has bothered me more than maybe it should is the upsurge of people who don’t seem to understand the meaning of personal choice when it comes to sex. I didn’t expect Rush Limbaugh to understand it and it didn’t surprise me when he came out condemning Consent. But so many other people who ought to know better…
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve known people who seemed to think that if a woman decided to have a sex life on her own terms it meant she should be willing to fuck anyone who comes along, indiscriminately. I thought there were fewer of them and I’ve been dismayed at how many women seem to think that way. But it makes one thing abundantly clear, that no matter what else you might think about Hillary’s relationship with Bill, there was no way she could have divorced him and have the remotest chance of becoming president. Because people are that petty.
Now, it may well be a divorced man might have just as much trouble, but I doubt it.
Anyway, we have a bit over three weeks till the election. I’ll make one prediction: the fallout from all this weirdness is going to cling to our political landscape for months if not years.
And since Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize, it seems appropriate to end this post with…
The changes they are a-coimin’.
