It seems that the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States has done what nothing else could: spur me to blog daily.
I'm still reeling. Swinging. Did I sound like I made some kind of sense the other day? My mood is like we used to say about the weather in Ohio when I was growing up there: if you don't like it, wait a minute.
Sometimes I'm: Okay, time to move on. The election is over and the election mentality won't help us now. What is the best thing to do in the current situation?
Sometimes I'm paralyzed by disbelief. I keep waking up with a sense of vague dread and unsettlement which takes a few minutes to understand before it hits me that the American people have elected Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States. This is why I keep making myself type things like The American people have elected Donald J. Trump to the presdency of the United States, in its full shameful glory. Cauterizing the disbelief. Before the election I joked about Bill the Cat. (The newspaper comics of my childhood featured a cartoon cat which, for a while, had had its brain replaced by Donald Trump, and which periodically ran for president.) The ludicrous image which leaps to mind these days, not sure why, is Fred Willard playing the Global CEO in the movie WALL-E. Maybe because Fred Willard does batshit crazy so well, and I am rolling all his roles mentally into one.
Sometimes I am: Let's try hard to understand how this happened and what the voters were thinking and let's stop slinging insults around and let's all just radiate peace and love to everyone around us and let it radiate outward to the whole world. I am not a politician, or a professor, and my soapbox is not very elevated. I am a mother of children and my job is to raise them right and if I do my job faithfully there will be a little more love and respect in the world and blah blah blah, you see where I am going with this.
Sometimes I have a surge of political activism and I think: Now there are people both on the left and the right who range from "kind of worried" to "scared out of their minds" about either the geopolitical or the domestic implications of a Trump Administration (Trump Administration. Trump Administration. Trump Administration.) Maybe those people will be able to join together to enact some useful political change that could mitigate the damage? I will write my Democratic congressman and tell him to fight the good fight! I will share petitions on Twitter to put a layer of Congressional oversight between the president and the nuclear codes!
Sometimes I think this new "wear a safety pin to show worried marginalized people you are a safe person" idea (Google it; I had to) is a great thing and sometimes I think it'll accomplish nothing but virtue signaling; I would like to hear from some of the worried marginalized people themselves before making a final judgment.
Sometimes I am just angry that the bully won, and so did all his lapdogs and hangers-on. People like Ann Coulter won. This is proof of the fallenness of the human race, as if we needed more. I am actually more angry at the enablers and lapdogs and hangers-on, the Wormtongues, than I am at Donald J. Trump the president-elect because, as I have written before, I think Trump is mentally ill, a sick man, and not entirely at fault for being the person that he is, but the enablers and lapdogs and hangers-on have not got that excuse.
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Today I find myself nodding in agreement with Jamie at Light and Momentary, in her post entitled "Sore Losers:"
I do not apologize for holding the leader of the free world to a high standard. I do not apologize for recognizing the plain truth that Donald J. Trump fails to meet that standard. I do not apologize for expecting the president of the United States to be a person who is, at a minimum, reasonably truthful and reasonably capable of putting a coherent sentence together.
I will not back down from my assertion that someone who has not managed to learn by age 70 that adults don't talk about genitals in the public sphere -- either the size of their own or the grab-ability of someone else's -- is unfit for polite society, let alone the highest office in the land. I will never rest easy about the judgment of a man whose only metric for evaluating women is how hot they are...
For those of us who said #neverTrump there is a bit of a balancing act here: we must deplore violence (I do) and support the peaceful transfer of power (I do) while also steadfastly refusing to normalize this gravely abnormal election (I'm going to do that too). I have an obligation to show respect for civil authority. But I have no obligation -- quite the reverse, I would argue -- to pretend I don't notice when someone seems untethered from reality.
It is not normal human behavior to assert repeatedly that you never said something that you actually said on video. If I talked to the family of someone who did so while also demonstrating paranoid and vengeful behavior, I would recommend that they take him immediately to a neuropsychologist for a thorough evaluation. Instead he is taking his family to the White House. This concerns me.
We cannot explain this away. We can certainly hope that his presidency is not marked by the volatility and the -- I can't think of another word here -- the lunacy that made his candidacy so singular. There has been a movement throughout his campaign to explain away his errors in judgment. I will not link to the Catholics4Trump page that asserts he wasn't really mocking a disabled reporter (he was just gesturing, they assure us), but it crossed and re-crossed my Facebook feed. I decline to accept their justification for his clearly aberrant behavior. And let me be very clear: I do not apologize for doing so.
Jamie's post reminded me of a concept that maybe not everyone who reads here is familiar with, the "broken stair" analogy. I first encountered it in an online support group for people who have an abusive family member, but I have also seen it used to refer to mental illness in a family or in an organization; either way it will work. Wikipedia (I just looked there for the first time) has it listed as a "missing stair" and says it refers originally to rapists within a particular community, but has since been expanded to other concepts. Here is the essence, from the Wikipedia article:
Missing stair is a term used to describe a sexual predator who many people know cannot be trusted, but who, rather than excluding, they work around by trying to quietly warn others. The analogy is to a structural fault in a house, such as a missing stair, that everyone who lives in the house has gotten used to and warns newcomers about, rather than fixing.
"[It is] something you're so used to working around, you never stop to ask "what if we actually fixed this?" Eventually you take it for granted that working around this guy is just a fact of life, and if he hurts someone, that's the fault of whoever didn't apply the workarounds correctly."
We have to get used to the idea of President Trump (President Trump, President Trump) enough that we can act effectively in this new reality. But we don't have to -- we mustn't -- get used to him enough that he and what he represents become a missing stair.
(Updated to clarify: Distinguish between run-of-the-mill differences between liberal and conservative solutions to problems, and the fundamental unhealthy and dangerous features of Trumpism. The broken stair is not "stuff I disagree with" or even "stuff everyone would disagree with if they saw it my way. I argue that part of the Democrats' problem is that lots of then called out every single Republican as a broken stair, and inured people to their warnings.)
We mustn't get to the point where we say, "I can work within this new reality, so everyone else should too."
We need to keep calling him out and pointing out that he is a broken and bent man, and his presidency (though real) results from a deeply weird and broken structural problem in the country that needs to be fixed.
I doubt we will all agree on the nature of the underlying structural fault. Did the ground shift under the foundation? Was the wood rotten? Did someone -- a resident, an intruder -- take an ax to this spot just above the landing? If we just replace the stair, will that be the end of it, or is there something else we all have to train our eyes to see?
That question is not answerable yet from where I sit, and even if we were to reach consensus on it we might all be wrong.
But damn it, at least let's go on seeing that a broken stair is a problem in and of itself. It is not the fault of the people who trip on it or who now hesitate at the foot of the flight.
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*Don't quibble with me about how the American people did not really elect Trump because the national popular vote went to Mrs. Clinton, or because only about a quarter of eligible voters cast votes for him, or because the electoral college is intentionally undemocratic, or because none of your friends voted for him. We knew the rules before the game started; turning nonvoters into voters is part of the task of a campaign; the popular vote margin, compared to the number of people who could have voted but didn't, is so small as to represent mere noise and could have been different if the weather had been different (I think; ask Nate Silver). To say otherwise is to persist in denial. Tempting denial, but isn't it always?
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Your posts have been really good, shellshocked or not.
Honestly, every single photo I have seen of Trump since the night he won? Even *while he was finding out he was winnig.* He looks miserable. It's possible he finally figured out that the office isn't actually a giant rally-party.
Posted by: Veronica | 12 November 2016 at 06:03 PM