Love and Hate in Las Vegas
“Whether you love me or hate me, you’ve got to vote for me.” That was President Trump’s statement at his New Hampshire pre-primary rally last night. I prefer the quote made about Elizabeth Warren by a USA Today journalist, a self-professed staunch conservative. He said, “I don’t care if Senator Warren is a mendacious Massachusetts liberal, she could tell me that she’s going to make me wear waffles as underpants and I’ll vote for her.”
Such is the state of play in our current high-stakes casino political environment. We are not playing a rational game like craps, where the Odds bet is a statistically fair one that does not favor the house. We are playing roulette where the odds are long and the house takes 6-8% before the ball even hits the wheel. In fact, I would argue that based on Trump’s failed casino management experience, we may be playing a long-odds 92% game where the croupier is pocketing half the pot in plain sight, so our odds are dropping to 46% or less.
What has so galvanized our republic? Or, again, perhaps more accurately stated, what happened to our disappearing republic that we are willing to allow a clear and irrefutable liar to hold us and all we hold dear hostage to the false hope that he will reclaim supposed lost glory, make coal an acceptable fuel source, never be had in a deal with burgeoning and growing economic powers, outmanipulate the greatest manipulator ever honed by the KGB, and make the world a better place by eliminating endangered species, immigrants and national parklands? Something unraveled in this country’s fabric in the past few decades since we elected the last good man, Jimmy Carter in 1976. I say that was the beginning of the end and unlike the Soviet Union, which was forced to acknowledge its breakdown by virtue of the fall of its symbolic Berlin Wall (how ironically appropriate is that imagery?), we carried on thinking that economic prosperity and ideological victory meant we were progressing.
What really happened was that we were simply mortgaging our future by cashing checks against our collective righteous national soul and the wellbeing of our great grandchildren. That’s a heavy thought for a summer Friday, but I do believe it’s true. After WWII we were filled with hubris and humility both. Our system, stamina and way of life (liberal democracy) had prevailed. And yet the greatest generation knew in their heart of hearts that mankind was capable of great harm to itself, both from evil intent and even when well-intentioned. That made us reach for peace (the UN and more) at great cost and with the full knowledge that it would take great and ongoing sacrifice to maintain that imperfect peace and that dedication to our painfully learned ideals. We went on to acknowledge that we had an obligation to our species to push the frontiers of scientific discovery (space and beyond) since the worldly solutions to the growing human condition were inadequate in the long run to sustain mankind. Mankind needed to take great leaps, not just the small steps of man (thank you Neil Armstrong).
Unfortunately, the passage of time and the consumption of too much junk food and junk culture (no stones being thrown without full acknowledgement of my own weaknesses thereof) has left us with a depleted soul or perhaps the absolute absence of a collective soul. This has reached epic proportions this week as we have watched a senior immigration bureaucrat bandy about the redefinition of the motto at the base of our beloved Statue of Liberty. The thought that our Lady of Liberty would only take in the not-so-tired and not-so-poor, admitting only the white, European huddled masses yearning to breathe free, with the separation and incarceration of any wretched Hispanic, Muslim or Shithole refuse from our teeming and fetid shore, to spread the light of libertarian-conservative views world-wide for every land, but America First, is a travesty and bastardization of all our ideals at once.
But wait, it gets better. Trump now believes that America First means that duly elected members of Congress are to be banned from foreign travel by enlisting, nay, strong-arming and masculinity-baiting a fellow “elect-me-at-all-costs” foreign leader such that he disallows them entry to their country on the anti-American notion that they are not allowed to have or express contrarian views. Whoa! That is epic. That is so wrong on so many levels that it is my belief that the guardians of democracy would be well within their rights to march into the White House (excuse me, into the golf clubhouse in Bedminster) and take the man out in arms and install him in Jeffrey Epstein’s vacated cell in Lower Manhattan, where he can read that rapist’s last words scratched onto the walls of our crumbling culture.
I hope that Donald Trump goes out on the course today and stays in the fairway, gets on the greens in regulation and one or two putts every green. I hope he scores well below par because he has set the standards of our country even lower than below par. Funny how that turn of phrase changes as one move from golf to life. Wait a minute, that may be the answer to this whole problem. Maybe Donald has spent so much time on the links that he thinks scoring low is the goal in life and politics as well as in golf. Have all of his acolytes and Igor’s all shrunk from the task of telling him that scoring low in polls and average economic benefit to the working population and bringing in immigrants to take all the infilled jobs (including on his own grounds crews) do not benefit by scoring low? We know he understands how lying and conveniently forgetting strokes is all part of the game, but does he not know that taking political gimme’s from ten feet out and declaring victory is being a bit too obvious, even for his Waffle House, Chick Fil-A gallery?
What we need to ask ourselves at this moment is not whether we love him or hate him. In that aspect of his ridiculous quote he is accurate. That says more about our failings or our fundamental rationality than anything about him. But what we must ask is how in Hell we can allow a person who is clearly non-compes-mentes, to hold the highest office in the land and let his own personal Igor control Congressional action through the senior Senatorial seat. We need to get out of Trump’s losing game of golf-roulette, where all the odds are stacked against us and the score keeps falling as he keeps smiling.