Back to Swampland

I’m finding it more and more difficult to write about That Asshole here, you may have noticed. He’s not an interesting person, just a hammerheaded schemer with the lifeboat ethics of hungry rat and an insatiable appetite for getting crowds of hayseed psychopaths to cheer him on. He’s somebody for whom the world “amoral” appears to have been invented – there’s really no one I can think of who’s in the competition, in our country’s long and odiferous history of pandering scumsacks and greedy lowlifes. Maybe he’s not necessarily the worst of the worst, maybe it’s just that he’s so nakedly, so artlessly, so transparently worthless and predatory as a human being, much less as a politician, that he stuns our capacity to understand humanity. I mean, if you or I were that craven and shitty, we’d also be alert and savvy enough to put a mask on it sometimes? Any adult would know as much, you’d think.

Not him. Considering him, and what we should do about him, is quite like worrying about how the pickup truck ended up in a tree, when we somehow missed the tornado. Too much we’ve been wondering, how’d that happen?, when what we should be thinking about is, how do we get it down? Because the dirtbags have always been with us – most often, they’ve been relegated to used car lots, mobbed-up backrooms, mercenaries-for-hire firms, cartel gangs, and entertainment law firms. The real spectacle upon us is that one of them has somehow clawed his way into being one of the most powerful men in the world, if not numero uno. That’s the freakout.

Because as corrupt and usurious and amoral as it has always been, the American social-political system has always been able to keep the barriers for entry nice and high – for better or for worse, you could say in the macro view, but you have to admit now that it’s been largely for the better. In the past, deranged werewolves like Huey Long, George Lincoln Rockwell, George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Roy Cohn, Newt Gingrich, and Pat Buchanan have tried to grab the ring, but some combo of popular opinion, institutional common sense and violence, real or threatened, kept them on the sidelines. Think about about how much worse 20th Century America might’ve been if one or more of those men ever made it into the White House.

Now one of them has, come and gone and trying to get in again, meaning that the system isn’t doing its job. For one thing, somehow, America has decided it would rather kill innocent schoolchildren by the score, rather than take a politician headshot every now and then, like it used to back in the day. Alright, that’s a dark if, I think, pretty on-the-money joke, but it points to the fact of how things have shifted: if schoolkids have to do active shooter drills, why not That Asshole, and the hundreds of G.O.P. shit-flies buzzing around him? Who should feel threatened?

If we have to have all these fucking guns, let’s put them to some sensible use, dammit. Which is all to say, as always, that That Asshole is not what’s wrong here, he’s just a low species of human, like human traffickers and social-security-check thieves and child-porn salesmen. What’s wrong is the fact that he’s bamboozled/brainwashed millions of Americans who, by dint of being over 15, should have a canny sense about when somebody is trying to talk a plunger up their ass. That’s what should happen: punt the dungball back into the gutter. I’ll wait.