WE’RE ALL HUMAN (EVEN REPUBLICANS)

For those who pay little attention to American politics, the name of attorney Michael Avenatti may be unfamiliar, but most of you have no doubt heard of his famous client, the porn star and ex-Trump hookup, Stormy Daniels. I bring Avenatti up because I have often wondered why Democrats don’t more vehemently challenge GOP complicity when President Bully Boy acts as if the country were his own personal fiefdom to ru(i)n as he damn well pleases. On August 10, Avenatti addressed that very question:

Now, I fully recognize that the Republican faithful (at least, a fair number of them) are human and, as such, susceptible to being sold a bill of goods and/or being evangelized by a vainglorious pied piper. As an ex-Catholic, I know what it’s like to be vulnerable to vested interests in positions of authority. They seem to have all the answers at a time answers are hard to come by, but you haven’t yet grown to realize that, to those who claim to have the answers, you are part of their agenda, another recruit to their cause/beliefs. Easy pickings.

So, while I can empathize with being gullible (because I’ve been there, done that), there is a bigger issue at stake here, and that is what kind of country are we becoming? When will it prove too late to undo the divisiveness, to blue pencil the Orange Man who debases the dark place that was once The White House? What in the name of civility and integrity has become of our standards of leadership?

America has never been “a perfect union”–far from it–but in a world where almost everything is relative, we are at a new low in my lifetime. For all the faults and failings of past Presidents, has there ever been one so self-obsessed, so megalomaniacal, so utterly incapable of reflection and putting himself in the place of those who come from a different place (both literally and figuratively)?

I started this post intending to intersperse some humor into a sober matter, but despite all the Trump satire and jokes that serve as a sort of laugh-to-keep-from-crying palliative (I plead guilty to occasionally getting in on the relief act), there’s really nothing funny about this President in the long run. At the end of the day, the joke is on us….and we brought it on ourselves. Now it’s up to us–we, the voters–to get serious about an act of contrition.

November 6, 2018 would be a good time to start.