Politics as an Unforgiving Mirror

It gets both comical and ugly particularly in Primary season when unarticulated fear and loathing is given voice and disproportionately projected.

America has the D.Ts. Or at least 25% of the 42%. But they are loud and their candidate strikes a chord which proves if you add a beaker of fright into a vat of frustration and detonate the cauldron with rage you get the guy with the red cap and coiffed hair, the government we really don't deserve. It’s the unthinking face of Populism.

Because your dog just died and your wife left you and your car won’t start you have found your man who knows just how you feel (even though he gets around in his own plane and is in his third marriage with as many bankruptcies) because he sounds like you (on nasty days) and he talks tough (like the schoolyard bully you secretly admired) and he reminds you how this country used to look, by God, when you were eleven years old…all white and no rapists running loose and women knew their place. He not only feels your pain he feels your teeth grind and your blood boil.

And he tells you who to hate. It’s important to know who’s to blame for all this turmoil, that shuttered Chevy plant, those shops on Elm street with Glass-Wax on the window, those uppity you-know-who, those lazy spongers and disappeared pension. It’s time to stop getting pushed around by China, Ayatollahs, war-lords, drug king-pins, beheaders, egg-head scientists, bleeding heart ecologists, that Muslim Kenyan in the White House, all those politicos in Washington, anyone running against him…none of them have a clue.

He has all the clues. If you can’t answer a question you attack the questioner. If you owe money you walk away. Was there ever anyone smarter? I ask you. First in his class, says he….even if records show he wasn’t.

It’s all so simple because he knows how to get his way. Like General Patton and General MacArthur. You don’t die for your country….you let the other bastard die for his. You take Manilla.  You don’t get captured like McCain. You capture them. You build a wall like the Chinese did.

He is the dealer, the wheeler-dealer. He invented both the Deal and the Wheel. He is also the P. T. Barnum of blarney; the face of America in the mirror.

And not once did I mention Donald Trump.