Relief
I think I speak for Kim as well when I say that I am very tired of politics. I have spent a lifetime ignoring politics even though I lived through some pretty turbulent times. My first election at the ripe old age of eighteen was the 1972 election that set the stage for the era of Watergate hijinx and Nixon. The big political issues were war and economy (Vietnam and Stagflation). Fifty years later in 2022, the stage is set on the era of Mar-A-Lago hijinx and Trump. The big political issues are war and economy (Ukraine and Inflation). So much has changed and yet so little is different.
By 1974 the world had been saved. First, we exited Vietnam in 1973. It was a messy scramble of an exit, but they always are. It is hard to gracefully depart the scene with your tail between your legs while you are shitting yourself. Nixon left unceremoniously seventeen months later under the echoes of denial and the umbrella of pardon. Elvis left the building three years later, but it took another five years after that until 1982 for Stagflation to crawl back into its cave. Meanwhile, the youth of the era (that would include me) went on to fame and fortune with plaid pants and freshly minted mortgages that were sure-fire inflation killers as housing poised for its generational value surge. Politics was a non-event in the face of burgeoning prosperity and the American drive for 2.3 children to a household.
But everything changed on a magical day in 2015. That was the day that Donald J. Trump came down his faux golden escalator to the lowest level of American political hell and announced his presidential campaign. That lobby at Trump Tower was not a new lobby. It was over thirty yeas old at the time. In fact, it was the scene of a great personal story to me in 1989 when I went through my first and very dramatic career crisis. I wrote a story called Who’s Watching about the incident and I will tease you by telling you that it involved a dozen Cartier bags full of jewelry and scarves and a particularly bad moment in the Memphis cotton merchant space. In a nutshell, I had presided over an error of omission in not catching a defalcation at a cotton collateral warehouse, and had to confess to that loss to a less than sanguine board of directors, all on the same day when I had to take a squanderous exchange of goods from arguably the top Fifth Avenue jewelry store located in none other than Trump Tower. The place is certainly on my list for top-rated scenes from Dante’s Inferno.
I didn’t know it at the time, but 2015 changed my life almost more than that day in 1989. I survived the latter and while it took fifteen years to meet Kim and complete the salvation of my eternal soul, the virtuous cycle did at least begin. In the case of 2015 and Donald Trump, I sit here after seven years wondering whether that horror show will ever end. We all enjoy joking about Donald. In fact, my first memories about Donald were the humorous stories back in 1989 in the days leading up to his first big bankruptcy. As my bank was his primary lender at the time, a fact that I can never totally reconcile since we were actually a very smart bank, or so we and the financial world all thought. The man-child was given a monthly allowance by our chief credit officer so that he could continue his lavish lifestyle and thereby presumably maintain his brand, which was thought to have value. I also went to a Friar’s Roast at the New York Hilton where my friends at the Friar’s Club invited me to watch Borscht Belt comedians lace into Trump for all his idiocies and idiosyncrasies. Even back then he was accused by Shecky Greene of going “prematurely orange” with his spray-on tan and his hair-sprayed coife. Who knew that he would come to dominate our every waking moment from 2015 until now?
And that’s the thing. He made “good” and profitable middle American television in the boon-times of reality TV. That same outrageous manner made him a money-maker for cable news on BOTH the right and the left side of the teleprompting aisle. He was the car wreck that you couldn’t look away from even though you know you should avert your eyes. Indeed, if you stared long enough and especially through the lens of Fox News, you would, most likely, turn into a pillar of salt, just like Lot’s wife. God forbade the Israelites from looking back on Sodom and Gomorrah, where the evils of man had turned to the perverse and God had determined that there was no redemption possible for those depraved and deplorable souls who were purely wicked. As Lot and his family fled to the hills, they were commanded to not look back because the visage would in fact seal their souls for all time and cause their hearts to harden to stone and hence the salty pillar that symbolizes the barrenness of man at his most evil. But alas, Lot’s wife was tempted just as we all have been tempted to watch the horror show that has become Truth Social. There are none so deceitful as those who stridently call themselves truthful and none so antisocial as those who must declare themselves sociable.
So, American politics as we know it today is still dominated by the man on the golden downward escalator. The analogies are almost too silly and obvious to be made, but there they are. The wasteland of Washington has gravitated to Palm Beach, but it is no less dominant as the boundaries of evil have breached the Beltway and spilled out into Middle America. The rabid rush to the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 was almost Biblical in its horror as those infected flesh-eating zombies that suffered from that Beltway Trumpian belch had turned on themselves and the democracy which had spawned them. For those of us watching it like the latest episode of the worst reality TV show of all time, it was surreal, and yet there was no awakening to be had. It has just kept coming at us and we keep turning on the cable news for relief only to cake more salt over our eyelids.
Then came the Midterm Elections with all the Cassandra wailing and gnashing of teeth over the ubiquitous and inevitable red wave. I stood seemingly alone (or perhaps next to Michael Moore) in remaining optimistic about the goodness of man and the sanity of the American electorate. First there were the portents of Liz Truss and Jair Bolsonaro. and then there was election night itself with the cautious realization that the red wave was more like a blue wall of decency. That was followed by a lingering sense that it would take weeks for resolution to come since election tabulation was as pitted a minefield as existed since The Hurt Locker.
And then, last night it happened. Mark Kelly was declared the victor in the Senate race in Arizona. And then Catherine Cortez Masto, not exactly a name that trips off the tongue or in our minds before this election cycle, was declared the victor in the Nevada senatorial race. By a margin that this morning adds up to 6,556 votes, a mere 0.31% of the registered voters in the state, this incumbent Democrat has been declared the victor. That brought the Democratic Senate rolls to 50, such that the majority in that all-important chamber was maintained. The fate of the House of Representatives, while still in doubt, is likely to go to Republicans by the slimmest of margins and no one seems to much care. So long as we held the Senate, the Democratic thinking goes.
The sense of relief goes way beyond this election. It seems to cap seven years of not just bad luck, but annus horribilis in American politics. We seem to have found our morning after at long last, and all due to a group of Las Vegans who number less than a single day shift at Caesar’s Palace. Relief sometimes comes in strange ways. The pull of cable news seems somehow less this morning.