Common sense with a sense of humor.
“While Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty, or even faintly amusing… he doesn’t seem to understand what a joke is… his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.” [British writer] Nate White
The last election seems far in the past yet close in memory. My memory lands on Kamala Harris describing her experience as a prosecuting attorney, opening with the identifying “Kamala Harris for the people.”
For the people. We the people. Those words are so powerful, so intense, so basic to being an American it is hard to believe that we now have a flabby fascist in the White House who cares not a whit for people but sits caressing his Fascism for Dummies playbook.
I have read the comparison with Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s but I think the comparison doesn’t work. Germany had been defeated in a debilitating war, its economy was in shambles, the people were dispirited, any leader who offered any kind of hope was better than hopelessness… and there was Hitler with his answers and promises.
In 2024 none of that applied to us, yet many voted against their own best interests. How?
From 1776 until now we have posited an America as a democratic republic, democracy from the Greek root “demo,” of the people: democracy a rule by the people. Who are “the people?”
Thomas Paine argued for common experiences to create a people, and argued convincingly enough for the revolution to succeed. We have had a nation of the people, by the people, for the people and we knew what that meant. We knew that the majority rules, that voting was a responsibility and a privilege, that we lived with laws that applied to all.
How can we vote against our best interests? It happens, I think, when personality tricks the rational mind, the common experience. It’s the wolf in Red Riding Hood, the snake in the Garden of Eden, the Pied Piper, the leader in Jonestown who told his followers to drink the poisoned Kool-Aid, and they did. It’s Kokopelli, the Raven, Bart Simpson, Archie Bunker, the bully who gets away with being a bully. We’ve all known such people. Just not as president.
I am convinced the system will right itself, that common sense will hold true just as it did
in 1776, that we will survive this fascist and be stronger. We can face much of this with laughter.
Back to Nate White: “He [Trump] turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness, a Shakespeare of shit. Even his flaws have flaws… there have always been stupid people, and plenty of nasty people, too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. If Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws—he would make a Trump. And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpsful of hair and scream in anguish, ‘My God…what…have…I created?’”
Read slowly. Laughter, the very best of all medicines.
Marie Howard