What it’s all about, I think
The Democratic nominee proposes Medicare
assistance for home health aides to help people who must care for
elderly parents while holding down a job and perhaps raising children,
and on the same day the journalist Bob Woodward makes serious
allegations about the Republican nominee to which a Republican spokesman
says the journalist is “a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally.”
There is the 2024 campaign in a paragraph. Serious civics versus a
bucket of bird droppings.
This is not the Republican Party that my father respected, the party
he felt he could trust to separate truth from fiction. The party of
Dwight Eisenhower has been hijacked by a New York playboy who wants Air
Force One and the helicopter and the Marine honor guard and though he’s
been convicted of sexual assault and fraud, 80 million Americans love
him and it will give them a thrill to vote for him. I’m glad my father
isn’t here to witness this.
Of course you already know this. We’re two nations and either you
believe the 2020 election was stolen and the crowd who took over the
Capitol the following January were true patriots or you are confident it
was not and that they were felons. There isn’t room for negotiation.
It’s a revolt by Middle America against the coasts, old against
young, commoners against college, evangelicals against agnostics,
McDonald’s against pad thai, and I as an old Minnesota grad fond of the
quarter-pounder feel conflicted, especially when I read that what
infuriates Republicans most is political correctness. It irks me too.
It’s why I haven’t listened to public radio for fifteen years.
Because even as Russia pounds Ukraine and Gaza is in ruins and fentanyl
flows across the borders and the oceans are warming, which contributes
to the monster hurricanes, if you listen to NPR you get the feeling that
the major problem facing us today is the unhappiness of nonbinary
teenagers. The mayor of New York is indicted, his staff flees, New
Yorkers know what’s going on, it’s an old old story, but because he is
Black, it has to be tiptoed around: the problem is that this great city
is a one-party town that tolerates corruption and it needs a mayor who
loves the city and that ain’t Eric Adams. It needs a Republican from
Missouri who enjoys art and music and food and who feels happy in a
crowd experiencing diversity up close.
It’s an election coming up that half the country imagines might bring
about less regulation, big tax cuts in the upper brackets, cuts in
Medicare and public education, the deportation of ten million, a ban on
abortion, but I don’t see that. I see a police van pulling up to the
gates of Mar-a-Lago and the Secret Service turning over their charge to
court deputies who’ll ship him off to a nice facility in Connecticut
that’s reserved for special cases.
There’ll be photographers at the gate and then that’ll be the end of
it. The man will be given a very quiet life. Introspection will be
inevitable. Maybe he and Mayor Adams will be cellmates. Over time they
may develop a rapport. Instead of Fox or NPR they may pick up a Bible
and feel the Creator’s great love for them and accept forgiveness and be
changed. It has happened before. The freedom to be free of yourself:
that’s what it’s always been about.