Burnt Out

By now, you know I'm no fan of President Pumpkinhead.  But I just can't continue feeding the fires of outrage day after day.  I knew this was going to happen.  I felt it coming, there is just too much to keep up with, in my more cynical moments I wonder if that is actually his plan, if these daily kicks to the teeth of our common sensibility are just smokescreens, intentionally provocative so that we become jaded and eventually inured to the effect of stooge-like bombast.
It's not just liberal folks like me either.  Here's Rod Dreher on The American Conservative this morning. Yep, his outrage ain't broke yet, nor should it be.  Puerto Rico is an American territory, Puerto Ricans can come here without a passport or a green card or anything, and we can go there, same deal.  Does Trump not know that? Or does he just not care? Either way it is an embarrassment.
I disagreed with a lot of George W. Bush's actions.  I ascribed sinister motives to Dick Cheyney.  There were times when they made me hopping mad (their incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina being one of those times), but it was more or less in the same way that I disagree with my parents about things.  There was no trouble with recognition of mutual citizenship and commonweal, they didn't ever say that they were just flat going to give up on New Orleans, or that the budget just wouldn't allow them to help.  Now I think I understand, as maybe we do as a nation, what it is like to have an unstable, abusive parent.  It reminds me of a line from a Tori Amos song, Silent All These Years, about a woman in an unhealthy relationship:

Your mother shows up in her nasty dress, it's your turn now to stand where I stand.  Everybody's looking at you, you take hold of my hand.

When I read Dreher's column, whatever other disagreements I might have with him, I wanted to just give him a big hug. There are so many things that we need to work on as a country, but it's like we're all just trying to manage the raging toddler who might just launch the nukes at any moment.  If Trump is deliberately inculcating that sort of insecurity then he is next level sinister.  If he's just doing it by accident he is next level incompetent.  I'm not sure which scenario is worse.
In the long run the hope that is timidly emerging in my mind is that Agent Orange will defoliate our partisan jungle and we will be able to find common ground with reasonable people.  That we will be able to once again work together on compromise solutions and things that are constructive to this nation that we must share.  That hope seems naive at the moment, but I am a believer in Grace, which is the only way this is going to end well.

From bitter searching of the heart, we rise to play a greater part.

-Villanelle for Our Time, Leonard Cohen