The subtle meter in Americans’ brains that tracks the degree to which the universe seems off its axis has been in a state of constant flux since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, but this week the needle slammed hard into the peg on the right side of the gauge. Red warning lights are flashing across Washington as even the now-typical levels of uncertainty and political chaos reach epic proportions.
It’s almost as if we need a recalibration of the insanity of the Trump era, a new set of definitions about what comprises normal presidential behavior.
Because what’s happening now left normal five towns back, stopped for smokes and brown liquor, and tossed the GPS out the window. This week wasn’t normal, and no amount of whistling past the graveyard will make it any different.
The sun will come up, and on Meet The Press and all the other Sunday shows the journalists will gather and cluck and look serious and whistle far and wee even as they do widdershins 'round the kirk, because they must very objectively refuse to mention what is obvious to a child: the man holding the office of the President of the United States is not fit to run a taco truck and shouldn't be allowed anything sharper than a rubber ball.
God save the Republic, because nobody else seems to be able to.
I'm coming to see this as more and more the consequences of habits of thought and law that come with making "the Constitutional order" all powerful, overtaking everything from fair elections, universal voting rights, . . . and everything up to and including the possibility of a tolerably decent life continuing at all.
ReplyDeleteThat would explain the regular functioning of our media that can see the results of its accustomed regularities but can't a. admit this is a result of normality set to those settings, b. admit that there are not only other possiblities but that those not normal ones are the only ones that will save us and our world.
One of the bigger reasons for the media not seeing that is that all of them are the beneficiaries of being the alterboys of that normalcy just as lawyers and judges and, especially justices are. We need a Jeremiah, a Micah, a Hosea and we get Chuck Todd. Even a Rachel Maddow isn't enough.