The End Of The Line

Looking for reasons beyond misogyny, xenophobia and racism gives The Trump's voters and campaign FAR too much credit. And it excuses what, to my mind, is inexcusable. It excuses folks who thought 1) Hillary was a lock and that, 2) therefore their vanity votes for Stein and Johnson were "harmless." 

And so they might have been, if Hillary had, indeed, held the "lock." 

But she didn't. She won the popular vote, by a whisker, a microscopic percentage, but those seemingly tiny, vanity-inspired hemorrhages, in places like Florida, Michigan, Virginia and Wisconsin cost her the election, and cost US at least four years of fascism-lite.

SO I've been saying my good-byes today. This really is the end of something, an epoch, an era, an age. A change has been tolled, the bells rung... I heard someone on an NPR show today say that now the press is going to HAVE to become more adversarial--that was the word--and I thought where have you BEEN for the past 20 or 30 years, child? The "press" is not going to treat The Trump with any but the gentlest kid gloves. They'll celebrate his successes, ignore and/or excuse his failures. He's their baby...

The biggest danger is that The Trump's electoral victory will legitimize and normalize the racial hoistilities and antipathies of his supporters....and it is ALREADY coming out in anecdotal incidents all over the country. Google "Day One in Trump's Amerikkka."  That nematode on NPR Wednesday was saying that The Trump was a "wake-up call" for journalists, and pointed to a need for adversarial journalism, and I thought: Are you SHITTING me? Where has the child been for the last 30 years of relentless, press stenography?

HDRC was not my favored candidate. None were. That said, I fancied I had the a normal citizen's duty to attempt to vote for the outcome that did the least harm. "Greatest good" is an illusion. Least harm can be felt.

Throughout the campaign, I had continually counseled a Rawlsian ethic for choosing for whom to vote. I rejected the "Lesser evil" trope as conceding the wrong points, and advocated the choice who represented the Least Harm for the Greatest Number. After the primaries and the Convention, that was Hilary Clinton. She (alone) could stop The Trump.

That seemed to me to be a more important project than voicing my personal, vain objections to a system I've been trying unsuccessfully to change since the 60s. Trump, I believed HAD to be stopped. I voted for Sanders in the primary, though by then the issue had been settled. When Hillary Clinton was nominated, she became my choice.

But "The Trump" prevailed despite my efforts. I "compromised my principles," in vain, again, apparently; I guess I'm grumpy that "you" didn't sacrifice yours in the same (albeit doomed) enterprise, and I guess a little disappointed, at that....

This appears to be the inglorious end of the fabled American political experiment, culminating in the 'election' of the most careless, willfully ignorant, intellectually lazy, morally corrupt, incompetent, dishonest, and reprehensible charlatan and mountebank ever installed in such high office with so much power. The Trump is the embodiment of EVERYTHING that makes "Loathsome White Men" such loathsome people. He's the Ultra Ugly American. He reeks of entitlement and privilege. He heaps excess upon excess, maladroit and malaprop in the same breath.

AND THIS is what all that nobility of aspiration, all that impassioned, enlightenment rhetoric, all that "Of, for and By" the people has led to. The institution of the presidency will not recover from this; at least, it is not supposed to. 

These are historic days. This is the terminus of that particular road.

It is "The End."