If you haven’t been a follower of Jim Wright at Stonekettle Station, he is a must read. I have written before about his essays. I expect some day they will be compiled into an anthology that will be used in schools to teach our children how to communicate, as well as offer insight into our times. His latest, The Latter Days of a Better Nation, Part IV, is an example.
He reminds us that expecting Trump to become presidential is expecting Trump to become a unicorn.
He begins by addressing Scarborough and the main stream media, who, throughout the election courted the Donald knowing full well what he was but somehow expecting him to become presidential.
We didn’t know.
Oh, woe! Woe! We didn’t know. That guy in the White House, why, he’s not the same guy we knew two years ago.
We didn’t know it would turn out like this!
We didn’t know he’d turn on us when we helped him get elected!
We thought it would be ok! We thought he would straighten out and start acting like a decent human being once he got elected! We didn’t know!
I mean, how could we have known, right? It’s not like anybody warned us. It’s not like there were any alarm bells. It’s not like there was a history of horrible shitty behavior…
We knew. Some of us tried to warn. We screamed our heads off. We knew. Jim says, “Trump skitters from one thing to another like a ADHD squirrel on amphetamines.” But MSM made sure our fellow citizens were freaking their damned heads off about a phony email scandal. They made sure we were told he was a “successful businessman.” He wasn’t. That he was smart. He wasn’t. That it was all an act, but he would become presidential after he was elected. And that he was a unicorn. I think, in their guts, most people knew better. But it was such a great show!
Wright compares Republican Trump apologists to battered spouses in denial. I used to work with battered women. The comparison is apt.
One of my favorite paragraphs:
Someday, this story, the one where Americans elected Donald J. Trump to the Presidency despite myriad and obvious warning signs, will join Frankenstein and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a classic cautionary tale. Parents will use it to frighten their children into behaving and teachers will use it to show the folly of willful ignorance and whatever passes for Hollywood in that distant future will play this idiotic social media fight between a sitting president and a couple of pretend journalists for laughs in an otherwise dreary and depressing tale.
He excoriates the ex military in Congress. It is well deserved. He also addresses people on the left, like Al Gore, who thought the office would make him a better man. Or say that if we ignore Trump, he will go away. Jim takes that excuse away from anybody who still wants a country when Trump is gone. And then he makes the most important point at all. The problem with Trump is that he is a symptom of a national disease. And getting rid of the symptom doesn’t cure the disease.
Somewhere in the last half a century, we Americans traded Apollo moon ships for the Creation Museum and the ugly truth of the matter is that Donald Trump is a reflection of who we’ve become as a nation….
Trump is the result of a nation that glories in ignorance, manipulated by conspiracy theory and a primal fear of the dark, that embraces monkey violence and cowers from the unknown future with bluster and bared teeth and a gun clenched in one fist, instead of looking forward with quiet courage, head up, feet wide, braced and ready with curiosity and confident they are prepared to handle anything that might come along.
Indeed. Who we have become. And what we have to do now that we have had that glaringly thrown in our faces. We have to stop chasing unicorns and get back to being a civil, decent, educated people.
Fair use doesn’t allow any more paragraphs. And, to be sure, the essay needs to be read from the top, without my words in the middle. I can’t do it justice. So please, go to Stonekettle Station and read the essay in it’s entirety. Then read some of his other essays. If you can, donate to his page, as that is his source of income. You can thank me later.