After the first presidential debate
We learned nothing new about our president—but what does it say about us?
What I saw tonight was not a sociopath, a megalomaniac, a demonic clown, a petulant child. I already knew all that. I saw nothing new.
What I saw tonight was a country that willfully, brazenly, and even enthusiastically allowed him to happen. A country that claims exceptionalism while vaunting a leader so crass and inexperienced that we are the laughingstock of the entire international community.
I saw a country whose apathy and laziness handed the GOP a staggering nine Senate seats in the 2014 midterms and enabled Mitch McConnell’s ascendancy, and in turn delivered us to the disarrayed state of our government today.
I saw a country so polluted by its taste for the appearance of wealth and fame that an unremarkable man who inherited $413 million from his father and had a reality TV show could be perceived as somehow understanding the plight of the working class — and having the expertise to address it. Even just writing that sentence makes me want to hose myself off.
I saw a country whose businesses are so culturally corrosive and greedy that only recently did it occur to Facebook that perhaps entities buying political ads should identify themselves and, uh, be American.
I saw a country so strangled by religiosity and its resultant conservatism that it believes any document written long ago — be it a bible or a constitution or a dollar menu — is morally unassailable and must be adhered to with unflinching disregard for the evolution of mankind.
I saw a country whose elected leaders disproportionately represent uneducated rural whites without passports when in fact most Americans live in cities and know generally where Europe is, the continent from which most Americans’ ancestors immigrated.
I saw an educated electorate so factionalized that Democrats consistently lose elections due to the party’s own cannibalistic obsession with moral purity, rendering otherwise intelligent people inexplicably incapable of distinguishing between imperfect allies and murderous monsters.
I saw a government in crisis, a democracy falling at terminal velocity into hell, and a populace so deeply and helplessly stupid that we cannot even begin to save ourselves.
This man is not a fluke, he is not a stroke of bad luck, he is not a correctable error that can be erased, nor a mosquito that can be swatted away. He is utterly American. He is one of us.
Twenty years ago when I was 16 and watched in horror as the Supreme Court installed an illiterate bumbling baby Bush into the White House, I knew it signaled something worse than just 4 or 8 years of GOP rule. Should anyone who was awake in 2000 be surprised we’re here, twenty years later? What’s happening to our country is much like the climate crisis in that we’re now experiencing consequences from before we even knew we were doing anything wrong.
And, as with climate, there’s nothing we can do to reverse what damage has already been done. We can only adapt and change course and engage in ways we didn’t before. The success of the American project will require scores of citizens to actually be citizens: to participate in ways they don’t want to, abandon luxuries they wrongly believe they deserve, and renounce beliefs they’ve held all their lives.
But you won’t catch me holding my breath.
