One candidate wants to take us back to the good old days, the days when America was great and especially the days when he was in charge. Oh the happy memories, of COVID and bleach and one million deaths, and two impeachments and George Floyd’s public execution, and Russiagate and January 6th, and Black Lives Matter, and all his criminal charges. “Those were the days, my friends,” as the song goes, we thought they’d never end.
The other candidate understudied with the oldest President in history. She got the gig by default, not by design. It was a no contest selection. She might try to insinuate that she represents change, and that she brings a new style, a new mood, a new smile. But hers is also a second term candidacy. Voters know what they got before. They kinda know what they are going to get again. Harris has no record to run on, save the Biden administration. She has no big vision because lawyers are trained to untangle the law. She is good at that.
The election comes down to- Do we voters want more of the same, or something different, for a change? It is a change which is a change back, and “something different” is a return to the same. What a no-choice choice, a nothing sandwich.
We can go back? We can stay the course. The one thing not offered to us is a future, a way forward that is a way out. No one is giving us that option. How come?
What about a future where politics is not a contact sport? What about a future where America doesn’t look like an exhausted superpower that other nations can ignore? What about a future where we are not spending billions on our allies to win unwinnable wars, or spending our taxes on rebuilding the cities we helped destroy? What about a future where we rebuild our cities, the ones our pioneers helped create? Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate comes the closest to some sort of vision, but right now, it feels like Tomorrowland is closed for repairs. We can’t get passed our past.
We are so seriously litigating what, over time, may seem so trivial. Do we really care what a former president did or did not do with the archives that his presidency acquired? Is the nation holding its breath to hear what sentence a former President will get for paying hush money? Will Wall Street collapse due to his tax frauds? With every trial, the coffers of his campaign swell, in support of this candidate who is nothing if he cannot portray himself as a victim and a martyr. Why are we scripting him deeper into that role, forgetting that his mendacity is his and the media’s MO.
History doesn’t repeat, we know, but 2016-2020 seems to be on an endless replay loop. The song we seem to be singing comes straight from South Pacific- “I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair.” and the washing machine just keeps spinning.
The first quarter of the 21st century has not been easy. It has consisted of one setback after another, coming so soon after celebrating the millenium, when with the collapse of Communism, we thought we had won. We thought history had ended, vindicating us, and the sunshine of democracy and capitalism was about to shine on a new world. The honeymoon lasted barely a year. The new era began with a stolen election, stolen from the people by the Supreme Court, Bush V Gore, eerily preminiscent of what was to come.
9-11 hit us hard, and suddenly, we were at war. Then another war and another. One, they said, we had to wage to protect us. The other was Bush’s father’s unfinished business and a chance to remake the Middle East in our image, no WMDs not withstanding. The national debt soared, but how much is too much if we are defending democracy? Then came the financial meltdown of 2008 and climate change and its tragic emblem, Katrina, and after the Obama respite, Trump walks down the escalator at Trump Tower on the way to 1600 Pennysylvania Avenue. “The Apprentice” now becomes “The West Wing- Part Two” offering a drama a day.
The Presidency is reduced to a must watch TV series. Who will he fire next? George Floyd is executed , and BLM takes to the streets, until COVID hits and we are shut down and a million die. Just when we think we have fired this crazy clown and can move on, we have January 6th and its long tail still dominating the discourse. Then, Russia invades Ukraine and Hamas attacks Israel, and we lose a sitting president to age decline, and almost lose a former president to the assassin’s bullet, not once but twice. Would anyone not think we are coming apart at the seams? How much more chaos can the system take? Sadly, we have come to think it’s normal, along with the regulation monthly school massacre.
Think about all we have had to go through in the last 24 years. Are you unscathed? I know I am not. The great unsettling might be blamed on Trumpism, but it surely did not start there.
When you step back and place ourselves into the flow of history, we come to realise our deeper malaise might not all be about Trump at all, If we were in therapy, our wise counsellor might ask us, when did we give ourselves time to recover from the first shock, and then the second shock, and then, the third shock, before we engaged in more war and more proclamations of superiority? War, terror, plague, storms, jim crow, depression are no recipe for healing. Is it any wonder that we feel like a nation under siege. How come we seem so surprised? Have we so naturalized our trauma?
We have bitten off more than we can chew. We still want to save the world, and we want to save our nation, and we want to save our planet. The rest of the world knows we have over reached, but we carry on heroically. We don’t know any better. We can save Ukraine and we can save Israel and we can save ourselves. But can we? Even overachievers can run out of gas.
One candidate channels the carnage, and the pent up rage, and the other smiles and pretends that joy is breaking out in Chicago and it is morning in America again. We know one candidate is seriously wrong. The other candidate isn’t sure what is wrong but is sure she can fix it.
Perhaps if we can get ourselves far from the madding crowd, we can console ourselves that we are still here, despite our Republic having absorbed so many seismic shocks that haven’t stop reverberating. We can’t anticipate how history will see us, but my guess is that 2024 will look like an aftershock of 2004. Can we cut ourselves some slack? What were we expecting? That we could pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again? Hubris got us into the mess and our hubris about how easily we can recover is the hubris that keeps us stuck.
We will come out of it, eventually, but the division, the bitterness, the loss of national pride is surely the sign of our hurting. It is what happens when we do not count our losses, take a time out to really grieve, embrace our vulnerabilities and learn from our mistakes. We do not seem to be able to allow ourselves such a luxury, and let’s face it, no leader since Clinton even had the capacity to lead the nation in its grief. What we get instead is grievance from Trump, or have a holly jolly election from Kamala. Grievance is nothing but grief gone sour, and this pseudo joy is just as delusional. We are stuck in a time warp.
The cold war ended but cold war warriors still rule the world. The climate crisis is now beyond dispute but the old energy economics still dominates. We thought we were free of reliance on oil, except it still being the reason to go to war and interfere with other nations elections (Venezuela) Did no one tell the Pentagon? Oil is so yesterday, until it isn’t. Fracking is out and now its back.
After Vietnam, and Afghanistan and Iraq, how can we still think war is the solution to anything? But Biden and Blinken and Harris clearly do. Their warped logic reassures us that the only way to end war is by waging war, no matter how unwinnable. And after the lies of Vietnam that we learn 30 years later kept us dumb and in the dark, we are still peddling the lies of war in Ukraine and Israel, thinking that we voters are still just as stupid as we always were. You think we will wait 30 years to know the real truth of how we messed with Ukraine and NATO against Russia and bolstered Israel’s occupation long before any war. We are not that stupid. Cut the crap of telling us we are the innocent defending the innocent.
We have lost our way, but to be honest, we got knocked off course. Our compass got lost in the ashes of the World Trade Center, when a rogue President legitimized torture and terror to fight terror. That is where, historians in the future might say, America lost the plot. It wasn’t at Mar a Largo or Trump Tower when the rot set in. It was George W Bush and water boarding and Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay. That was us, the US of A. Senator John McCain called us out in his distinctly defiant voice. But no one listened. Obama got elected to end the era of terror and ended up expanding it.
2024 is no new existential crossroads where we have to decide which way to go. We are already there. Instead of the most consequential election, it is probably the least because we are so far gone. All it will do is make clear the disaster we have created for ourselves, no matter who wins because both are peddling false hopes.
Forget about all the criminal cases you want to bring against a fraudulent president. When a President tears up the constitution to defend the constiitution, you know the system has been corrupted, and that happened in 2003, not 2016. We didn’t just get here yesterday. We have been accelerating towards this cliff since 2001, with the neocons cheering us on, and now being consulted as gurus to tell us where we went wrong.
What is happening in 2024 is the long unfinished struggle for the American soul. What has happened to us is not a reflection of who we are, but how we over reacted surely is. As we look at the one million graves of COVID, most of them casualties of incompetence, not the virus, and the graves of the war dead of Iraq and Afghanistan, victims of our hubris most of all, and all the other victims of racism and poverty, health care that doesn’t care and education that only teaches privilege is power, we have to ask ourselves some confronting questions.
After 24 years of crisis, who are we really? What have we allowed ourselves to become? When we look at a Trump Presidency, or a Harris Presidency, I think too many Americans are only seeing more of the same shell-shocked, sell out generation that lacks the courage to call us back to our better selves. Private vice has become the preferred menu for consumption and not public virtue, the virtue that our founders knew was essential to the survival of the Republic. We are an impatient people. We cannot wait, but healing is a patient art. A heart transplant can’t be done in 5 minutes, not even 20 years.
2028 might be the election that starts the healing process and invites us to head out on a new course that finds our true north again. Until then, the future is nowhere on the national agenda. What we have instead is “yesterday” with Donal Trump on a MAGA Revival tour, (cue up the Beatles) or more of the same, the current offering of today, the Biden shadow, ( cue up “Happy Days are here again.”)
We thought we had moved on, and we had so much to move on from, because we had to, but clearly, there is so much more that we have never gotten over because crisis just keeps happening. 9-11. then wars, economic depression, climate disasters, gun violence and racism, covid plague, impeachments and insurrection and assassinations. Don’t blame Trump. We have turned our post 9-11 grief into grievance and despair, and reduced our trauma to trivialities. Because no leader even begins to grasp this aftermath which is the nation’s enduring trauma, there is no way November 5th is going to fix that. No way. It could even make it worse.