Why So Serious?
I have a friend that is one of four of us on a text chain. We are all more or less the same age, ranging from 65 to 80, averaging at about 73. The youngest and the oldest are Republicans and voted for Trump each of the last two presidential elections, obviously successfully the first time and unsuccessfully in 2020, The other guy and I are both liberals, but I cannot say that we are both Democrats. I do not know for a fact that is a registered Democrat, but I suspect so. I know I have never registered with any political party and my voting pattern over 24 presidential elections (I choose to count the upcoming one since I know for certain how I will be voting) has been to vote for a Democratic 21 times and a Republican three times. In fact, I think when I voted for George H,W, Bush in 1988, it is safe to say he was the closest thing I found to someone who I really liked as President. It’s unfortunate that he was as hapless and ineffective as he was, but his “kinder, gentler” manner is what drew me to him. Anyway, that is my way of saying that I consider myself an independent voter that votes for the man or woman and not for the party or even the ideology so much (though the candidate most often embodies the ideology). So, in our little text chain we have one rabidly pro-Trump person and one who likes to text “Fuck Trump” quite often, though I believe he is somewhat disingenuous about that since I have no confidence he will not be casting his vote for Trump again this year. My compatriot liberal friend likes to appear as the more balanced of the two of us, so his texts usually involve a lot of chin scratching as though he is thoughtfully concluding his opinion and not strongly committed a priori. Nevertheless, because he is so strongly against organized religion, whenever the issues of the separation of church and state come around (which they are doing more and more these days thanks to the Christian Right movement in the Republican Party), he has a hard time not showing his true liberal colors. I guess that still means that I am the extreme left member of the group, but not really. I sympathize with most of the progressive positions, but I am too much a pragmatist to advocate for them. I have come to appreciate the importance of compromise in our political situation. In fact, I believe it is increasingly imperative for us to find places of compromise if we are to continue forward as a viable and righteous country…indeed, the leader of the free world for better or worse. I think that makes me more of a centrist than anything. My red friends love to throw AOC in my face and I find myself saying I don’t support AOC’s brand of extremism.
What I do know for sure is that I despise everything about Trump as a man and especially as a politician (this country has never seen such political posturing and changeability of ideology in the service of electability) and I admire everything about Biden (he takes the righteous stands he feels are good for the country and only so often seeks compromise to find harmony in the electorate…witness his recent pronouncements on immigrant asylum). If he were not so old, I would declare that Biden has replaced Bush #1 as my favorite president. There is no contest about who I think is the most despicable president the country has ever been so ill-advised to elect, and that is Trump. I never thought in my youthful anti-war stance during college that I would say that someone could be worse than Nixon, but I am prepared to say so now that we have seen what Trump is capable of. I can say that Biden has unquestionably been the most positively effective president in my adult life. The things he has accomplished in the last four years are nothing short of amazing. I truly believe he has put the country on a better path, and all the more amazingly, he has done it with a narrow margin in Congress and more divisiveness than this country has ever seen….not to mention a Supreme Court stacked in a blatantly partisan manner, against him. When it comes to this election, I, like most Americans, am disappointed with our choice. If Biden were younger, I would have no concerns standing up for him 100% based on his track record, and yes, I would like to see another four or more years of progress towards the goal of leveling the playing field for all Americans that Biden has espoused and begun.
In the movie The Dark Night, Heath Ledger tells a story about a lethal killer who can’t understand the concern being expressed about a victim. He says “why so serious?” to the character that becomes The Joker, with the reddened scars on either side of his mouth where he was permanently disfigured by the villain’s humorous way of extracting vengeance against him by widening his smile in that artificial manner. When you think about it, it is a grotesque and macabre depiction of how an evil person can turn a perhaps otherwise normal person into a demonic figure by inflicting great and scarring harm on his soul. Beaten children beat their children. We have all heard it. We have all seen it. Trump is that evil villain, sitting on the weak and downtrodden of our society. He has held them down and sliced a smile into their faces by making crude and insulting jokes about the goodness of our American way of life and the pure goodness of a man like Joe Biden. He has grinned with evil intent and asked America, “Why so serious?”
Tonight we will watch as Trump and Biden engage in an octogenarian Battle Royale. There can be no closer analogy than the guy with the black-hatted Snidely Whiplash look and feel, using every dirty, untruthful and vile trick he can muster to overcome the pure and perhaps occasionally and seemingly naive Dudley Doright. Some people I know say they would prefer not to watch the match because they are fearful of Dudley faltering and slipping and even more fearful of watching what has become of the weaker-willed of our nation that supports the evildoer and prankster that finds humor in other people’s misery. One expects to see Snidely Whiplash acting badly, trying to shove Dudley’s face into the mud, but what is particularly upsetting is to see the way in which his followers cheer him on with glee. They have been wrongly called the “deplorables” when they should have been sympathized with, less because of their views and status in our society and more because of what the villain has done to scar their souls for life with his evil sense of humor. To take a scene out of many movies (think The Postman or any of the Mad Max series), the person most pitiful of all is the stumbler who knows nothing better than to laugh when the arch-villain does something despicable and cruel. He laughs through rotten teeth and with some form of facial scars that turn his frown into a grotesque smile.
Why so serious? Why am I unable to just chill out and laugh at this clown show that Trump has brought our nation to? Because he has permanently (or at least for a generation) blackened our national heart. He has trampled our souls whether we follow him or merely watch him. If the world goes further down that path, as we seem perilously close to doing, there will be nothing to laugh at. We may very well need the next apocalyptic flood to cleanse our collective souls. And if we are able to hold up and Dudley Doright is able to beat back the black-hat, as I hope and pray he will, then maybe through kindness and gentility, we can find our way back from the precipice. Some may find my words overly dramatic. Why so serious? Because the situation is serious.