Our Shameless Submission to Our Blighted Angels

It’s hard to know the source of our current conundrums. We have a president who won by the thinnest of margins contesting his defeat by the thinnest of margins. I recall a friend, a longtime Republican voter, seeing in Trump someone who would “shake things up.” Why shaking things up — as if the governance of a country was comparable to how we prepare breaded chicken — is a wise choice in a world plagued by climate change, growing income disparities, and oceans filling with plastic, I do not know. Trump has certainly shaken things up. He has told us that science does not matter. Or that it’s overrated. That expertise is overblown. That he alone can fix things.

We find much our nation in the thrall of a grifter. Of a man who paid off a porn star to keep his adultery from a wife caring for a newborn. A man who found it necessary to defend the size of his penis during a presidential debate. A man unread and who watches television all day. A man who started with the lie of his predecessor’s origins. A man of three wives, all foreign born, who disparages the journey and hope of immigrants seeking a better life. A man whose policies are governed by his unending need for adulation.

And now we find our path to a more perfect union and faith in our better angels succumbing to the demons of me first, of individualism run amuck, of you got problems, well that’s too fucking bad. A nation where doing ok isn’t enough if it’s not more than the newly arrived, the struggling upward, the different than me. This is a place where shame isn’t a word. Where the welcoming of strangers cannot be found. Where hope lies in a ditch and wonders what has become of us.