Month: November 2020

“Ring Out the Old, Bring in the New” could not be more apropos than it is now. As badly as I want to find the Trump presidency humorous, I can’t. Granted, he has been an easy target, even for me. The pundits and cartoonists have had a field day like never before. I admit, I do love the millions of cartoons that have emerged so easily during the past four years, usually with very little tweaking of the real truth. 

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He can’t laugh at himself, at least not that I have seen. Of all his spineless GOP sycophants, including Mitch “Gobble, Gobble” McConnell, Lindsey “Cracker” Graham (or Lindsey “Yawl come now, hear?” Graham), Mike “Throw me a Bone” Pence, and Rudy “Fingers His Balls” Giuliani, the only person who is not a fair humor subject is Melania. If she had any other countenance than a scowl, she keeps it hidden from the public. Who can blame her? It looks like she is always seriously constipated, or she has on wool long johns. Privately, as she snuggles into her guillotine-fitted Kryptonite chastity belt, I want to imagine her laughing fiendishly as she counts the days and money until she can escape. I heard that she has started a PTSD (Post Trump Stress Disorder) chapter in Washington.  Maybe she and Mike get glimpses of a comic side to the Orange Man, but I doubt they get by with openly snickering. Unless, they’re hidden in the bathroom closet amongst the vats of tanning lotion, OJ and bacon grease while Trump is getting his body make-over, which includes a thin suit, flack girdle, inflatable gloves and other appendages, orange-brown coloring, Beach Boy brand hair dye, pucker kit (lemons), etc.

Mike’s Ode to Hormel

As Mike knows well, there can be problems with Hormel hair.

He thanked the Lord he sent a fly instead of a bear.

Trump has not taken his loss well, as expected. In retrospect, I think Trump was a mistake, but not so extreme as to be unrecoverable. He too easily exposed a darker side of our underbelly which most first graders could have predicted. Trump’s daily extremist techniques wore us down, thus unleashing the beast side in us. Apparently, too many of us are still closet racists, sexists, bullies, even white supremacists when Trump gave us an excuse to party without consequences.

If we don’t consider this election an immense wake-up call, almost a gift as to how fragile our 250-year-old democracy still is, then we don’t deserve the temporary relief that Biden will provide us. Temporary, because he must take on the biggest challenges in history both for this country and the world: climate change and an out-of-control pandemic, individually bad news but together a deadly cocktail. I’m not saying Biden is responsible for the world, but we certainly can return to be the beacon we once were as recently as years ago. But, without bipartisanship at every turn, we have no hope. None. Meanwhile, Europe is waiting for us to catch up regarding climate change, but we are all in the same untethered Covid-19 boat.  

The truth is all that matters, and ever did matter, and it certainly doesn’t discriminate between between political positions. As a retired scientist, we are bound to seeking the truth and facts that reflect reality, regardless where it leads us. Otherwise, research and learning are useless, and that can be a precious waste of time and energy, not to mention horribly wrong and dishonest. 

Accepting and implementing truth is rarely painless. Since the 1980s, scientists have been begging the public, the politicians, everybody that we need to take climate change very seriously unless we are willing to accept a mega-tragic ending. No one listened and now we are in almost over our heads. The same holds true for the Coronavirus. We ignored or listened to the experts too briefly, and now look where we are. If we had made the tough sacrifices like moving rapidly to a fossil fuel free world we needed to make in the 80s and 90s, we would have been there by now. Even now, that transition to sustainable energy isn’t going to be as difficult as it might seem because the technology is so much further along and way more popular than it was before 2000. We only lack the will and motivation to do so. Both can shift rapidly, especially if there are leaders to take the lead and in the right direction.

Trump and his corruption-riddled gang provided us a glimpse how bad it could get. He was a lesson for those of us alive today which we can pass on to our grandchildren. He took us to the bottom of the well, where fortunately we saw our reflection in the water, and what we saw wasn’t particularly appealing. I’ve heard a lot of concern about the fact that almost 50% of us didn’t see that frightening reflection and didn’t see the need for major change, thus Trump’s invincible core. In 2018, the highly reputable magazine, Science, reported that the percentage for societal change need only be 25% of the population, which is exactly one-half what we already have. The motivation, which I believe is there now, should get us off dead center, and the implementation is already happening with Biden’s team as we speak. As I see it, we are half-way there and the only thing lacking to move ahead is getting over or around an ego that transcends anything any of us living today have ever witnessed in a president. Were Americans not so confused and fearful of a leader so eccentric, so abnormal, so egocentric, and so selfish as Trump, I believe he would have been gone long ago, even given his lap-dog core. But now he is gone, despite his histrionics and barrage of unfounded lies. I don’t honestly believe that Trump’s core liked him (who could) but they were mesmerized by him, almost hypnotized.

As Joe Biden’s hat suggests, I believe we have already put the rose-colored MAGA glasses away and are returning to a reality both in an administration and in a society. And to a norm that, I hope, we all recognize and feel comfortable with.

In the 1998 movie, The Truman Show, Jim Carrey played the main character, Truman Burbank, where he is the unknowing dupe in a sci-fi sitcom that takes place in the fictional idyllic community of Seahaven, Florida. Everything is copesetic until Truman takes his sailboat to the edge of the set only to bump into the sky and tear it open and he discovers a genuine theater. The real world of 1998. Later, when Truman realizes that everyone else is part of the long-running show and walks out of the studio and into the real world, the live audience, the other actors, including his wife, cheer his escape. The other side of the set in a Truman Show 2020 would be quite different in ways I have bludgeoned you to death countless times in previous posts.

The Truman Show was a nostalgic experience for me because I could, I can, relate to Seahaven. Seahaven could be anywhere in this country. I spent some of my formative years in a small farm town in NW Ohio in the late 40s. I led a traditional Midwest WASP kid’s life with a physician father, stay-at-home mom, 3 younger sisters, an orchard next door, a collie, a cat and a Lionel train rolling around the tree every Christmas but no BB gun (father figured I’d put my eye out). Had it not been for the fact that I contracted rheumatic fever at 6 and was in bed for two years trying to stay alive and be tutored at the same time, it would have been a fantastic childhood and it still was.

It was often on an Elm Street or Elm Street wannabes in a small rural Midwest town in the first half of the century, that nostalgia got its roots in literature, cinema, poetry, theater, etc. at least for baby-boomers. In the late 40s and 50s, hundreds of Elm streets thrived all over the U.S. with endless sentimental examles in literature such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith (1943), Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play, Our Town, about Grover’s Corner, or my favorite, William Saroyan’s, The Human Comedy (1943), a novel set in the Armenian town of Ithaca in Southern California. We can’t forget It’s a Wonderful Life, classic movie produced in 1946 based on the novelette, The Greatest Gift (1943) by Philip Van Doren Stern. That literature, for the most part, was optimistic and idyllic from that period, symbolizing an America that was ending and not coming back. It was a transition between the Depression and a world-changing war vs. a revitalized, post-war America.

In 1984, Elm Street got a serious make-over when Wes Craven discovered that it still had sex appeal and Freddy Krueger joined the neighborhood and became a household name. The Nightmare on Elm Street left skid marks in the shorts of those of us who were afraid of the dark (and I refused to see it!). Mary Poppins had retired from dropping down chimneys and GIs weren’t coming home to ticker-tape parades, hugs, turkey and good old Uncle Josh. GI Joe was an ass-kicker with a big ass gun and a big ass thingy for Barbie. We were more than ready to let Freddy into our now, on the cusp of becoming a strongly techno-aociety.

Nightmares were great in literature and on the screen, but only if they remained there. The process of desensitization to violence had begun probably with the assassination of JFK and the Vietnam War but it was the first time we baby-boomers saw the unfiltered results of raw violence on the TV and in body bags.

Now, leap ahead another 30 years to the 2010s and Freddy, officially offed in 1991, had spawned many spectacularly horrifying and sanguine spin-offs since the original, now featuring slashers, chainsawyers, human vampires, dinosaurs, wood chippers, puppets, dolls, fishermen, doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, accountants, ants, spiders, sharks and badger bad-asses. I believe every taxonomic group of animals and even a few plants (Little Shop of Horrors) has been represented. I was so ignorant of that genre that I thought Freddy and the Texas Chain Saw Massacre dude were one and the same. I think my daughters corrected me on that one, even though they claimed they never saw any of them, which was probably true since they were cowards like their old man. The body-chipping scene in Fargo had me leery of pencil sharpeners for weeks. Combine all that with a media that went into convulsions and got fired if they didn’t get their daily story of bridge abutment beheadings and dumpster babies. The upshot was, as Steve Martin said about John Candy in my favorite comedy, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, “I can take anything because I’ve been with Del Griffith.”

In 2016, a reincarnated Freddy Krueger went to Washington in the form of Donald Trump. What had been only horrifying, sometimes so absurd as to be laughable nightmares for those of us who had over-dosed from watching too many rerurns od The Apprentice, stepped off our pillows and into our lives in the shape of a real living and breathing orange monster. Mr. Trump was really in the White House and not as a waiter but as the POTUS. Since then, roughly half of us have been in therapy trying to get our lives back in order while the other half reveled in the ecstacy of having one of their own on center stage. Their man had actually risen much higher than the highest level of incompetence a person of his background, political experience, and moral fiber could achieve and then some. During Mr. Trump’s reign of chaos, this country has been in a state of daily disbelief, shock and near-panic. What hath God wrought? None of us had ever experienced anything like the kind of instability we are experiencing now.

We’ve had four years of neglecting or simply brush-fire fighting the humongous issues of the day. Much of it was there all along and finally bubbled to the surface. Covid-19 probably was looking for an opening to explode into stressed environments. Also, we can’t ignore the daily, if not hourly challenges that a derailed president provides. This neglect simultaneously exacerbates the negative impact of the others previously mentioned.

“Heeeerrrreeee’s Johnny” has become one of the most famous lines in cinema, delivered by Jack Nicholson in the Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic based on Stephen King’s novel, The Shining. Nicholson was parodying Ed McMahon’s introduction every night of the great comedian, Johnny Carson. In the movie, the deranged husband, Jack Torrance, terrorizes his family and surprises them in hiding with his trademark ghoulish grin, “Here’s Johnny” greeting. and an axe. This is exactly how Trump has affected many of us.

Trump completely took us off-guard. I don’t think it was because we were being complacent, but I also don’t think most of us realized how fractured our country had become and how deep those fractures ran. The signs were there, given the power of the gun and how white supremacist brand racists, sexist, misogynist  and predatory we really were. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. Politicians had ceased to be politicians years ago and morally and duty were no longer on their radar screen. The conservative party had an unofficial pact with their followers; I’ll feed you and you feed me. In biology, we call this a mutualistic relationship.

It is now November 2020, and we are in the midst of an anticipated but dreaded election, however exciting—a duel between Trump and Biden. It looks like it could be a fight to the death, but eventually truth will find its way to the surface and when it does, if it has been suppressed for only four years as opposed to eight and Biden is elected, the ugliness will likely recede over time to be only a bad nightmare. If Trump is reelected, this once great nation will have succumbed to its dark side and could easily reach a point of no return, and fairly quickly, too.

We desperately need stable leadership more than at any other time in our history and it will need to be bipartisan leadership largely because of four years of total neglect of immediate challenges of both climate change and a raging, deadly pandemic. During Trump’s term, irreversible ground has been lost in both arenas, which translates as increased human and biological mortality of both habitats and species, as well as private and public property.

Consequently, the triumvirate of exective, legislative and judicial branches needs to decide to grow up and quit playing “Scratch My Back” with the president and address the real world. This would be the world that Truman saw when he rammed the set limits with his boat, but two decades later. If that were to happen, we might be able to get our country back. That also means the obvious needs to happen: cooperation and compromise, exactly how our Founding Fathers envisioned things would work when they crafted the Constitution. And Trump’s fictional concept of MAGA could actually become reality down the road. I’m not sure what Trump’s historic yardstick for MAGA has been, but it really doesn’t matter, we have no where to go but up.

Joe Biden can’t do it alone and if the Republican controlled Senate decides to take their marbles and go home (again!), the ghost of Donald Trump will continue to terrorize the halls of Washington, occasionally tossing treats to Mitch and Lindsey and their Rat Pack of cowards and darkness and depression will remain.