Photo: AP/Jim Cole
In the wake of another Super Tuesday where Donald Trump rampaged and Marco Rubio consigned himself to a watery grave, we share a few choice observations
Somewhere, Marco Rubio is staring in a mirror after another Super Tuesday defeat. For the first time in months, he recognizes who he sees in the reflection, but it’ll take awhile to be OK with that.
He’ll live.
Off in the distance in Ohio, John Kasich is pleased with the evening’s results. He’s sitting in a back room with friends, family and staff, feeling like a grandfather who just learned his latest grandchild was a boy.
He knows that winning is a bridge too far, but at least for one night, the governor remembers those nights in the Reagan White House where he walked around, caressing the occasional wall, knowing that if he kept his nose to the grindstone and lived relatively clean, this would one day be his house too.
Fantasy feels so good when you’re young.
Ted Cruz looks in the mirror too, but he never looks himself in the eye. Far too much darkness inside of him to ever do that. Feeling like the underdog gives him a subtle erection, it makes him feel vital, and it helps him ignore the fact that making friends has always been a dicey proposition for him.
Every time he slips on his ill-fitting suit jackets, he thinks to himself that his mission is righteous, and if more people thought like him, maybe we’d all have a chance. Whenever he can’t sleep, which is often, he pops in that Princess Bride DVD and thinks maybe he’s Wesley in disguise as the Dread Pirate Cruz.
I suppose we all start out as human. Some of us, anyway.
Over at the Mar-a-Lago, the walls sweat with an old and evil musk emitted by just about anyone with the last name Trump. Donald never stares at mirrors, he just stares at people.
Donald Trump isn’t the fault of any political failure, he’s our failure. He’s the ejaculation of the cult of personality.
For a man who thumbs his nose to drugs and liquor (part of the problem), knowing he’s won something no one said he could or should helps the blood move faster through his reptilian heart in a way that some of us would describe the first time the girl or boy of our dreams touched our leg in just the right way.
There is no such thing as a dream deferred if you shop at the right stores and spend the right kind of money.
2016 doesn’t feel like the ’60s, but maybe here we are. American culture fell asleep somewhere around 1984 when we were all told that it was morning in America and Michael J. Fox smiled on Family Ties, reminding us all that being a Republican was cute in its own stuffy way.
We had our New Wave music, and we had Reagan, and everything was OK for everyone who wasn’t you, but that was OK too, because then you had a carrot off in the distance to run towards.
Morning in America meant it was nap time, and boy did we sleep.
We woke up when Rodney King got beat, but when the fires died down, we went back to sleep.
Ever since then we’d have fits and stirs, call them farts in the night. The world moved on and we had no reason to be too upset about anything, especially once the computers got here to suck us in and help us forget that we were all alone, because now we could be alone together.
When the planes hit the towers, the alarm went off for some, while others where just alarmed. We had a new enemy, a new something to hate, even though the really cheap mortgages we all bought into were slowly turning into a time bomb with a bigger payload than any amount of jet engine fuel.
We’re awake now, we’ve been awake for awhile now, but Jesus, is our hangover still here? In our bleary-eyed waking dream, we forgot who we were, and began accepting the demons in our dreams as real people.
Donald Trump isn’t the fault of any political failure, he’s our failure. He’s the ejaculation of the cult of personality. For so long, we’ve ignored our own responsibilities and projected them onto others.
The whole time Morning in America had us deep asleep, we thought someone would keep the house clean and the coffee brewed in our absence, but when we woke up, the door was wide open and what came inside, well…some things just don’t want to leave, do they?
2016 is no uglier than any other year, the fear and loathing Dr. Thompson talked about is still here, but now it’s so much harder to ignore.
We hate one another 140 characters at a time, and now that we know everything about our neighbor thanks to social media, we realize we can’t stand them anymore than we can stand ourselves.
Whether it’s Donald, or Hillary, or Bernie, or Ted, or whoever…our choices seem bleak because we’re bleak. We haven’t grown. We treat politics like we treat basketball tournaments, and tomorrow seems like a fairy tale only non-existent people get to enjoy, but the truth is we face tomorrow just like we always have…and maybe that’s the problem.
It’s the loathing that gave Trump power. We turned our heads in indifference as he climbs up the leg of Lady Liberty with a knife in his teeth and a rapist’s look in his eye.
Election cycles bring out the worst in us, because this is the season where we ignore responsibility the most. If we don’t get what we want, it’s someone else’s fault, never ours. If Trump wins, it’s because racism and fascism won, not because you didn’t take a true interest in how politics should shape your life.
We have the same old candidates because we never give much of a damn anymore for local politics, you know, the grim and gritty stuff. Sometimes the dogcatcher has to be elected, but there’s nothing sexy about that.
Dogcatchers can’t make America great again and promise you things you could get for yourself as long as you gave enough of a damn to work for it. Dogcatchers only clean up dogshit, and that doesn’t matter to you, and why should it, right?
It isn’t until that Dogcatcher works their way up the pike, until they become the candidate that matters to you, and so often they aren’t the person you want, and you could’ve stopped them two or three elections ago, but you couldn’t be bothered, could you?
The ugliness of 2016 is entirely our making. We won’t talk about race unless it’s to point fingers at one another. We won’t talk about income inequality unless it’s to stick a knife in the sides of poor people who have the nerve to think that they deserve more money for their work.
We don’t talk about anything unless it’s to point out how other people make our lives worse.
It’s the loathing that gave Trump power. We turned our heads in indifference as he climbs up the leg of Lady Liberty with a knife in his teeth and a rapist’s look in his eye.
Maybe Donald Trump becomes president, and maybe cooler heads prevail. No matter what the outcome, it’s nights like this that show us what life has become. Not because of any election result, but how we are talking about one another, right here, right now.
There’s so much bad blood between us, the loathing is at such a fever pitch that we could go at any moment. But we won’t. Instead we’ll seethe, we’ll sit here impotent to true change, the type of change that moves mountains.
No, we’ll bitch and moan and sometimes we’ll even protest, and it’ll feel good when we see other people do it, because why would we ever get involved? We might get arrested and miss who got the rose on The Bachelor.
Nah, this isn’t the 60s. I don’t know what 2016 is right now, but some day, historians will say this time was important because of x, y, or z. They’ll make documentaries and write books about 2016, and those of us still around might wax nostalgic about how alive we were, and it’ll just be one more lie we tell ourselves as we try hard to forgive ourselves of the sins we’re sure to commit before election day.
Life is full of maybes, full of blocked wishes and unfulfilled dreams.
It would be nice to know that no matter how insane we’ve gone in the years since our Morning in America nap, that we still have a chance to figure it out before we shoot an entire generation in the head with a 24 carat Trump Gun.
Hashim R. Hathaway (Uncle Shimbo) is the host of the Never Daunted Radio Network, and proud father to NeverDaunted.Net. You can reach him on Twitter @NeverDauntedNet