Tag: Civility

AN IMPORTANT LESSON LURKING AMONG THE RUBBLE ON FACEBOOK

I found something pretty incredible on Facebook the other day. It was hidden in the clutter of proclamations, declarations and protestations that dot our daily dose of social media cognition. It was unaccompanied by bold headlines and offered no sharp-edged sarcastic graphics. In plain, quiet 12-point type, the words almost seem to whisper. This is what they said:

“Just a thought but today, once again, I was reminded to use caution (when) speaking with family, friends and relatives. Those words might be the last thing that you ever have a chance to say to them. If you truly care, be careful. Sometimes hurt feelings become anger. Choose wisely.”

The message was written by a guy I barely know, someone I went to high school with 50 years ago. I can’t precisely place him, although I have a vague recollection of the two of us shooting spitballs in study hall. Now I am marveling at the wisdom and well-timed relevancy of his advice.

We’ve all been locked into this bizarre, and seemingly endless, political passion play for the last 18 months. Who among us has never chosen unwisely, never treaded or trampled on the feelings of those who don’t share our world view? The instantaneousness of social media is not always compatible with audience analysis and wise choices. Much has been written about how the presidential campaign, and its ongoing aftermath, have strained and destroyed close personal relationships (here, here and here). The New York Times just released a compelling video involving three parent-adult child dyads grappling with the Trump-Anti Trump dichotomy and the toll it took on their relationships. We’ve all gotten so caught up in preaching the righteousness of our beliefs that we needlessly and unintentionally hurt those who see the world differently.

I was so taken with my classmate’s advice, that I went to his homepage to see what other pearls of wisdom David had to offer. I am using only his first name here out of respect for his privacy, since he didn’t sign up to share his comments with my 300,000 blog readers. (Readership estimates calculated by Sean Spicer and Associates.) David heaped praise on the Republican/conservative control of all three branches of government and was critical of former President Obama for “forcing his extreme far-left agenda on an unwilling country by executive orders, left wing judges, and obsequious bureaucrats.”

As a far-left true believer, I disagreed with the content of virtually all of David’s political writings. Yet, there was something refreshingly nostalgic in the tone of his messages. He stuck to the subject matter, to the issue at hand, and never threw daggers or venom-laced sarcasm at those who might hold contrary views. I found it utterly refreshing. It was a throwback to our high school days.

I was on the debate team then. We learned how to argue both sides of an issue, a process that instilled a tremendous respect for differences of opinion. I covered the Minnesota Legislature in the 1970s, back when politicians treated each other with respect and civility, fighting over ideas without assassinating each other’s character. All of that now seems as outdated as rotary telephones and Smith Corona typewriters. We seem to have lost the ability to disagree without being disagreeable.

I live in a 55-and-up community where we all smile and wave at each other. The friendliness, however, morphs into cut-throat vindictiveness as soon as the neighborhood list serve detects a whiff of political thought. This week’s “nana na nana” exchange was over who was more obnoxious, Madonna or Donald Trump? The monitor had to shut it down and remind us to avoid political discussions. Here we are, a bunch of geezers in the twilight of our lives, and we can’t carry on a political discussion without sounding like professional wrestlers.

Remember the old “Saturday Night Live” riff on Point/Counterpoint? Dan Akroyd always started his counter to Jane Curtin’s opening argument with, “Jane, you ignorant slut!” It was a funny exaggeration back then. Now it’s standard procedure. I finally went cold turkey on the nightly cable news talk shows because I couldn’t take the shouting, the interruptions and the caustic sarcasm. Then come those daily email solicitations from political groups, all using what Andrés Martinez, an Arizona State University professor, calls “dystopian depictions” of the opposition. Martinez astutely notes that people are more inclined to push a button and donate $20 if they think they are helping to fight evil incarnate, as opposed to a reasonable person with whom we disagree.

Polarization clearly wins for cable programming and internet fundraising. But it also seeps into our psyche where it does absolutely nothing for our humanity. One of David’s political posts defended Trump’s bankruptcy filings on the basis that they were nothing more than a successful business strategy. From the left, there are obviously a number of rational and legitimate retorts that could have been offered. Instead, an alleged liberal, posted this rebuttal: “So a success? Fuck no, and it takes a brainwashed piece of shit idiot to even pretend it’s so. Know what’s good though? You’re old, and will be dead soon. And the world will be better off.”

The angry, young author of that comment deserves to be hit with a speeding spitball. The truth is that the world will be better off when there are more people like David in it, people who stand up for their beliefs without denigrating those who believe something else.

TRUMP NATION ONE WEEK LATER

It’s been a week now since our election earthquake, and true to seismic form, our life has become one aftershock after another. White nationalists, formerly known as bigots, are crawling out of the shadows of the netherworld en route to the West Wing. Muslims, Latinos, blacks and Jews are being brazenly attacked by emboldened racists, freed from their closets by their victorious shake-things-up change candidate. Meanwhile, many on the left are feeling shockwaves from President Obama’s seemingly sanguine acceptance of his successor.

Nobody escaped the severity of these aftershocks, not even the quake’s walking epicenter himself, President-elect Donald J. Trump. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump left his White House meeting with Obama Friday totally stunned over the depth and breadth of the job he just won. Apparently, it has now dawned on him that this presidency gig may take more than a few 3 a.m. tweets to pull off. Obama has agreed to spend more time mentoring Trump before the inauguration. The president also told reporters he believes The Donald will soften many of his more provocative campaign promises.

The president’s subdued reaction to the guy he once called a “carnival barker,” has riled progressives and prompted a Washington Post think piece to speculate that Obama is still working his way through the denial stage of the grieving process. I think there may be a better explanation: after an eight-year search, Obama finally found a Republican in Washington who will listen to him. As a longtime advocate for special needs students, I wholeheartedly salute this tutoring project.

Unfortunately, I suspect that most of Obama’s lessons will be geared toward procedural matters, maybe with a shot or two at trying to nudge his student’s policy positions slightly forward from deep right field. What Trump desperately needs help with is that other part of the presidency, the one that aims to reach people’s hearts and pull the country together in times of severe distress. You know what I’m talking about. It’s what Obama did after the Charleston church shooting; what George W. Bush did after 9/11; what Bill Clinton did after the Oklahoma City bombing and, what all presidents have done on so many difficult occasions.

No, there has been no terrorist attack, no mass shooting. But large portions of this country are hurting right now. Given his campaign’s vitriol and rhetoric directed at various ethnic and underrepresented groups, the fear and trembling of living in Trump Nation has been rampant everyplace, from elementary schools to college campuses and beyond. For some time now, at least in most communities, overt racism has been a cultural taboo. People have been fired for using the N word. Those who openly attack others based on race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or gender identity are quickly called on it and ostracized. It’s what most of us call civility and decency. Sadly, there is a faction of Trump voters who see it as a state of political correctness that just died in the electoral college. Unleashed since the election, this cabal has spread its hate and ugliness throughout the land. For example:

In Delaware, a black woman was accosted by four white male Trump supporters boasting how they “no longer have to deal with n*****s.” She said one asked her, “how scared are you, you black bitch? I should just kill you right now, you’re a waste of air.”

In San Jose, a Muslim student said she was attacked from behind in a parking garage by a man who pulled at her hijab and choked her.

In Texas, fliers depicting men in camouflage, wielding guns and an American flag, were distributed throughout Texas State University. Here’s what they said: “Now that our man Trump is elected, (it is) time to organize tar and feather vigilante squads and go arrest and torture those deviant university leaders spouting off that diversity garbage.”

In Maryland, a sign advertising Spanish services at an Episcopal church in Silver Spring was ripped and vandalized with the words, TRUMP NATION WHITES ONLY.”

In a “60 Minutes” interview, Lesley Stahl asked Trump to respond to reports of racist attacks by his supporters. He seemed stunned by the news. Asked by Stahl what he would say to his supporters doing things like that, Trump said, “I would say don’t do it, that’s terrible, because I’m going to bring this country together.” Pressed by Stahl for an even stronger response, Trump tried to crank it up a notch, like he was in a role playing exercise: “I am so saddened to hear that. And I say, ‘Stop it.’ If it—if it helps. I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: ‘Stop it.’”

Therein lies the problem in elevating to the presidency a man whose only notion of leadership is making decisions and barking orders. Even a city council member in the smallest of towns has a better instinctive feel for reaching out to people and appealing to their better angels. Trump has never had to do anything like that before. He doesn’t know where to begin. He is a fish out of water. What makes it even more sad is that it is in his own interest to reach out to America right now, to condemn the attacks and the racism, to apologize for any hurt he caused in an overzealous campaign moment. No, such an approach wouldn’t change the minds of the never-Trump voters, but it would mitigate his negatives a bit, soften his tone, make him seem a little more human, a little more caring. It’s the thing good leaders do. Unfortunately, it is simply not in his wheelhouse. And that’s one more thing we’re just going to have to get used to here in Trump Nation.

WORKING THROUGH THE PAIN OF A HORRENDOUS CAMPAIGN

Pain has been my constant companion these past several months. Like all long-term relationships, it’s had its ups and downs, and now seems to have settled in – for better or worse – as a member of the family. No, this isn’t just about my recent surgeries. I’m also addressing a much greater source of pain: the 2016 presidential election.

There are remarkable similarities and distinctions between the two, the burning and stabbing at the nerve center of my most recent surgical site, and the foreboding fear and angst invoked by a dystopian political campaign of Trumpian proportions. Experiencing both simultaneously was an opportunity for introspective reflection on how the mind processes and copes with negative stimuli. I know that sounds, alternatively, like a bad grad school dissertation subject or a prisoner of war tactic banned by the Geneva Convention. Bear with me. A point will soon emerge.

As frequent visitors to this space know, I’ve spent some time in a medical odyssey of broken ribs and reoccurring tumors large enough to qualify for their own zip codes (here and here). My daily challenge has entailed searches for pain reduction by finding just the right way to sit. A large pillow to the left of me, a smaller one to the right, another behind my back, adjusted ever so slowly and slightly so as to find just the right combination to take me to that wonderful sweet spot, a euphoric moment in time when there is . . . absolutely . . . no . . . pain. It sometimes takes hours for me to get to that place, but once I’ve landed? There is no greater glory to be found. This is pain’s hidden blessing, the bliss that plays the yin to pain’s yang. People sit in chairs every day and feel nothing at all. But when pain has gripped your entire being, clogged all of your senses and shut out the world, only to suddenly disappear once you have arranged your body and pillows in just right way, well, that’s a high unmatched by any opioid. If you don’t believe me, here’s a little experiment you can try at home: Lift one end of a large couch three to five inches from the floor. Place one foot under the couch and drop it. Quickly lift the couch off your foot. Bask now in the momentary delight of instant pain relief!

So picture me, perfectly contorted in my reclining office chair, bathing in the nirvana of painlessness. Careful not to do anything that would unblock my nerve receptors, I slowly extend my right hand to the cordless mouse and double click on Politico’s Playbook. Another woman told her story of being forcibly groped by Donald Trump, who just issued a denial on the basis that she was too unattractive to grope. The crowd cheered and chanted – what else? – “Lock Her Up!” I quickly manage another mouse click to the Washington Post. There’s a picture of a white biker at a Trump rally waving a confederate flag in one hand and, in the other, a sign that says “Blacks for Trump.” Another mouse click to the Real Clear Politics polling site. The average of national tracking polls is within the margin of error.

Through it all, my physical pain remains at bay, but I am overcome now with an entirely different form of trauma, a deeper and darker sense of angst, an existential foreboding that somehow manages to shake the very foundation of. . .well, everything. Never in our lifetime, or before, have we come so close to having as our president a racist, misogynistic autocrat morally and intellectually incapable of leading. This is a much different kind of pain and there aren’t enough pillows or positions to manage it. Earlier this fall, there was some momentary relief in rapid mouse clicking, landing on a really good poll or a story or two about Republicans repudiating their candidate or a particularly poignant rebuke of the latest Trump atrocity. As a last resort, there are always those left-of-center sites like Talking Points, Daily Kos and Teegan that offer some momentary solace, but that’s more by way of escape, denial or support, than meaningful, lasting relief.

Some pain simply demands that it be felt in all of its agony. Dodging or denying it only makes things worse. Trump pain is that kind of pain. His campaign has done exactly what his true believers wanted it to do. They really don’t care what kind of a beast he is. They are disgusted with the status quo and they want Trump to “shake things up.” And that he has done. He has shaken this country and our lives to the rafters. He has shredded the basic values many of us hold dear: democracy, civility, decency, respect, justice, dignity, inclusion and diversity. This is pain that we can’t avoid or turn our backs on.

The challenge will be how to constructively work through that pain after Tuesday’s election. If Trump wins, we must be ready to find effective ways to fight for the values he’s stomped on. If Hillary Clinton wins, we will have dodged a bullet but the pain will linger and the gun will remain loaded. She is the first presidential candidate in history to attract impeachment talk before election day. The biggest challenge, and one of the most important, will be to do what we should have done long ago – reach out to many of those ardent Trumpians, people who have been ignored, neglected or left behind, and pull them into a real movement that addresses their needs without destroying the fabric of this country. That’s a tall order, but it’s the only way of overcoming a deeply embedded pain.

LONGING FOR THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF MITT ROMNEY

The date was Oct. 2, 2012. The day’s top political story? Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called for permanent immigration reform. Elsewhere on memory lane, do you remember Romney’s biggest gaffe on women? It was during the second presidential debate. He was excitedly describing his diversity hires from his days as governor of Massachusetts and said, “We had binders full of women.” With those six words, Romney created an instant internet meme and one of the most popular Halloween costumes of 2012. Four years later, his successor spent the weekend trashing a former Miss Universe and then called the New York Times to complain about how his opponent said bad things about the women her husband slept with. Oh Mitt, we hardly knew ye!

It’s all such sweet, innocent nostalgia now, but it wasn’t always thus. As we approached the 2012 election, those of us on the left side of the aisle saw Romney as the goofy, out of touch, rich kid we tried to avoid in high school. We couldn’t imagine anything worse than a Romney presidency. Now we can. He is still the goofy, out of touch, rich kid we tried to avoid in high school. But if Hillary Clinton’s numbers suddenly go south, and if we could make a quick deal with the devil, well, Hail to the Chief, President Mittens!

During the past 24 hours, Donald Trump has been vacillating between two of his current obsessions: the body size of the 1996 Miss Universe, and intimate details of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s personal life. The two are linked only in the byzantine torture chamber that is Trump’s mind. HRC caught the Donald off guard during last week’s debate when she introduced Alicia Machado, the beauty pageant winner and one of his many body shaming victims. Trump left the debate sputtering about how he might have to “get nasty,” as if he’d been teaching a Dale Carnegie course all these months. He later clarified, in the call to the Times, that his new appeal to women will be to drudge up Bill Clinton’s affairs and “reveal” how Hillary criticized some of the other women in her husband’s life. That would be an October surprise only to someone who has never heard a country-western song or read the Starr Report, whichever came first. Then, a few hours later, he reversed course and complained to a Pennsylvania rally that Hillary has never been loyal to Bill.

In the beginning, Donald Trump was a joke, the Pat Paulsen candidate of 2016, someone who parodied the antiseptic, polished, focus-group-tested rhetoric of real politicians. In one of the cruelest twists of political fate our country has ever seen, the joke caught on. Many of us stopped laughing a long time ago. This campaign is no longer about issues or public policy. It’s about human decency and dignity and civility. It’s about showing respect for people you disagree with, or who come from different backgrounds, ethnicities or experiences. This qualification for office was unwritten and unspoken but has always been there, and until now, was always followed. We Americans argue about everything else – taxes, foreign policy, education, the environment, – but we have always shared the desire to be led by a decent, dignified president. Prior to August of 2016, every presidential nominee, regardless of party affiliation, met that standard.

Trump does not. He is mean, vindictive and cruel. He delights in name calling, in hurting anyone who differs with him. He embodies the very worst of our current culture and its screaming, divisive discourse of verbal abuse and incivility, of dismissing contrary views with brutal, painful attacks on those who hold them. Sadly, this election is not about any of the vital policy matters facing this country. We don’t reach those issues, because this election, first and foremost, is about only one thing: keeping a man who delights in hurting people out of the White House.

DECISION 2016: ALL WE ARE SAYING IS GIVE VERBAL ABUSE A CHANCE

This presidential campaign is quickly emerging as one of our country’s darkest hours. Public policy discourse has taken a back seat to brutal name calling. Poetic rhetoric has been replaced by angry noise. Civility is out. Personal attack is in. The worst part is that this venomous angst is seeping through the pores of the body politic, infecting all of us – our relationships and our families. Roughly one third of people polled recently

A House No Longer Divided
A House No Longer Divided

said they have been attacked, insulted, or called names on the basis of their political opinions. One in four of those surveyed said a recent political discussion permanently damaged a relationship.

Facebook executives recently told the Associated Press that U.S. users sent out four billion political messages during the first seven months of the year. Although the network claims not to track unfriending metrics, a spokesperson told AP that such communication cutoffs are on the rise. That includes people who left FB in disgust over political posts, as well as those who stayed but selectively weeded friends based on partisan rants. The news service quoted Scott Talan, an American University communication instructor who tracks social media and politics as saying he has seen some fairly hostile Facebook exchanges recently. “They range from pretty harsh, graphically laced, attacks upon people. . .to statements of ‘if you support this person, you can no longer be my friend.’”

My 90-year-old uncle, Jenner Nelson of St. Cloud, Minnesota, encountered an analog version of this Facebook estrangement and adroitly moved to rectify it. He’d been lobbied for months by the Trump and Clinton factions within our family and decided to let us all know where he stood by posting both candidates’ signs on his lawn, as pictured above, but only after covering their names with large X’s of red duct tape. “To heck with them both,” he said. Although the gesture didn’t dampen any of our partisan passions, it helped, at least momentarily, put a political campaign in perspective.

A couple of factors brought us to this point. But first, these words from our two major party candidates for president: “racist”, “bigot”,  “crooked”, “totally unqualified”, “dangerous”, “dishonest”, “incompetent”, “fraudulent”, “basket of deplorables”, “lose cannon”, “stupid”, “unfit”, “weak”, “total disgrace, and “pathetic”. And those are just for starters. The word cloud emerging from this campaign is horrendously strident. Put that together with the political intransigence that has paralyzed Congress for the last several terms and we are left with . . .well, a lot of people yelling at each other. One recent survey indicated that the incivility of political discourse is so bad that 40 percent of classroom instructors are hesitant to teach about the election for fear of adding to what is already a serious bullying problem in their schools.

Yet, there is something else going on here. Families, friends and coworkers have always differed on political choices, usually without creating an interpersonal crisis. My parents used to joke about canceling each other’s vote on election day. Nobody is laughing now. The difference with this election is that it goes to deeply held values, the kind of stuff that is part of our core, that defines who we are. We can have friendly disagreements over health insurance or NATO funding without a lot of existential angst. It’s a whole different situation when you are talking about keeping Muslims out of the country, deporting undocumented immigrants, building a wall around Mexico and issues of equity and justice for African Americans and the LGBT community.

This is visceral, heart and soul stuff. We are in different places because we’ve had different experiences that have contributed to our conflicted wiring. My 1960s childhood turned me into a passionate human rights advocate. That means I’m against the wall, the Muslim ban and for amnesty-based immigration reform. That also means I see Donald Trump as a pariah, someone whose world view is totally contrary to my values. On the other hand, there are good, decent folks out there who see jobs disappearing and their communities filling up with people from other countries and cultures. They long for the days when America was a different kind of place. They want to recapture what’s been lost. To them, Clinton is the pariah and Trump is the one with a map to their promised land.

Our vision for the future could not be more different. Yet, they are both so clearly valid to us that, particularly among people who share a connection, it is painful to talk about politics right now because it is a conversation that, by necessity, challenges and threatens our deeply held conflicting views of the world. This interpersonal quagmire could be mitigated by national leaders who would engage us with a vocabulary of civility and accommodation instead of name calling and polarization. Sadly, those cards are not on the table. All we can do right now is follow the road that is right for us and respect those we care about who take another path.

THE JOE PATERNO STORY: DON’T LET FACTS MAR THE LEGEND IN OUR MIND

Joe Paterno, depending on your perspective, was either God’s gift to college football or a pathetic pedophile enabler. The continuum between those two extremes runs the length of a football field. And there is nobody at the 50-yard line; you either revere JoePa or you despise him. Although he has been dead for nearly five years, when it comes to a posthumous life, this guy has been more active than Elvis.

This past Saturday, for example, there was a celebration in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Paterno’s first game as Penn State University’s head football coach. During that time span, he won a gazillion games and became a beloved legend and prolific rainmaker for the Big Ten school in State College, Pennsylvania. Then, in 2011, his halo took on a sudden tarnish when his longtime assistant, Jerry Sandusky turned out to be a serial child molester. Many of the sexual assaults occurred in the university’s athletic facilities. Although Paterno denied any knowledge of his assistant’s crimes, an investigation by former FBI director Louis French found that he had likely known about the pedophilia and did not report it. Just a few weeks ago, according to the Washington Post, a judge unsealed documents in a civil suit showing that one of Sandusky’s victims told Paterno about his molestation in 1976, and that the head coach told him he didn’t “want to hear about any of that kind of stuff” because there was a football season to worry about. Sandusky was convicted and is serving 30-60 years in prison. Paterno was fired by Penn State in late 2011 and then died from lung cancer in early 2012.

It was against that backdrop that Penn State rolled out “Joe Paterno Day” at the football stadium Saturday afternoon. And everyone went to their corners of outrage. “Why don’t they call it Protect a Pedophile Day?,” messaged one camp. “Paterno is innocent;” said another, “he is vilified only by those who know nothing.” Some placards said, “We Love You Joe!” Others asked “What About The Victims?”

Lauren Davis, a journalism major and opinion editor for the Daily Collegian, Penn State’s student-run newspaper, incurred brutal alumni wrath with her understated editorial suggesting that, under the circumstances, a Paterno tribute was in bad taste. Emails, according to the New York Times, immediately poured into the school newspaper calling Davis a “clueless, treacherous traitor,” an “idiot” and several other names the Times said it could not print. They were from graduates from the 1970s and earlier, all unloading their venom on a journalism student. The message from one man was, “I hope God can forgive you for your actions, I sure as hell can’t.”

So much anger, so much hate, so much divisiveness. We’ve grown accustomed to it in our political campaigns, now we can’t avoid it at a football game. That’s what happens when we chose to live in a black and white world of heroes and villains. The truth is that Joe Paterno is neither. All of our lives are compendiums of choices, good, bad and in between. If JoePa knew about the molestation and said nothing, he made a terrible choice, but it doesn’t mean he didn’t make other choices that were good, that helped develop and shape his student athletes. It does mean, however, as Lauren Davis, the student editor, wrote, that Penn State should not be honoring this guy, treating him like a saint, particularly with the brutal testimony of the victims still haunting the community. The past is over. Sandusky is in prison. Paterno is dead. Let it be. This is not the time for a party.

Speaking of bad choices, those geezer graduates, who verbally abused a journalism student for spouting wisdom that escaped all of them, have hopefully exhausted their quota for the year. But probably not. Psychologist Eric Simons says his research shows that a sports team is an expression of a fan’s sense of self. He says self-esteem rides on the “outcome of the game and the image of the franchise.” That might explain why a bunch of Nittany Lion alumni in their 60s and 70s are insisting that a dead football coach is blameless. If JoePa covered for a pedophile, it’s a personal wound to them. And we thought football was just a game.

A COLLECTIVE NUMBNESS TO TRUMP ATROCITIES

The most perplexing mystery of our time, other than Duck Dynasty and the Kardashians, has been how Donald Trump can say so many stupid things and continue to be a viable presidential candidate. Let me crack that cold case with one word: volume. He says so many stupid things that they evolve into an anesthetic blur. Under the power of that anesthesia, well over 40 percent of likely voters are ready to extend their middle finger to the political establishment and send this clown to the White House.

Take the past 24 hours as an example. Trump came clean about his fabricated conspiracy over President Obama’s birthplace, falsely accused Hillary Clinton of creating the issue, and then suggested that her Secret Service agents disarm and see if anyone tries to kill her. And Al Gore paid a price because he claimed to have invented the internet. But don’t you see? That’s the point. We remember Gore’s internet gaffe because it was one of the very few stupid things he said. He spent the rest of time talking about boring stuff, like carbon footprints and Social Security lock boxes.

If Trump had been intently focused on well thought out policy issues for the last 10 months and then, in a weak moment, advocated the assassination of his opponent, it would have been curtains on his campaign. It’s all people would have talked about from now until the election. Instead, in a matter of hours, he will have pushed that thought from our minds and replaced it with another outrage. The human brain is not equipped to simultaneously concentrate on multiple atrocities.

Broadcaster Keith Obermann took a stab at it this week, much to the delight of the progressive community. In a well scripted and delivered 17-minute rant, Obermann listed 176 truly outrageous things Trump has said or done. He included the attack on the Pope and the Gold Star parents, his history of not renting to black people, his claim that Obama invented ISIS, his suggestion that Russia hack Clinton’s emails, his insistence that his buddy, Valdimir Putin, would never go into Ukraine, which he invaded two years ago, and 170 other equally bizarre comments and actions. Yet, days later, when I started to write this paragraph, I had to download a transcript of Obermann’s rant because I couldn’t remember the laundry list. It’s like laughing your head off at a comedy club but being unable, the next day, to remember more than one or two of the jokes.

This is why it seems like the media is hounding Clinton on the email and foundation stuff while not holding Trump to his foibles. In one instance you have two issues with long shelf lives. In the other, you have serial defects, each succumbing to its successor. In the history of dumb political stuff, nobody holds a candle to Trump’s volume. That’s why it is easy to recall those other non-Trump blunders. Remember how John Kerry “voted for the bill before I voted against it”? Or, Howard Dean’s scream? Or Dan Quayle’s misspelling of potato? Or Rick Perry’s “Oops”? Or a helmeted Michael Dukakis ridding in an armored tank? Or Gerald Ford promising no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe when such domination was already well in place? Or Sarah Palin’s foreign policy bonafides based on the proximity of her back yard to Russia?

Donald Trump outdoes all of them combined, before breakfast. On a rational level, it is eminently sensible to suggest that the American people would be embarrassed to have as their leader someone so thoroughly entrenched in ignorance and buffoonery. For a sizeable portion of the electorate, however, this campaign is not about rationality. It is about their utter disgust for our government. It’s not so much that Donald Trump is their savior. He’s their middle finger, their protest vote against a changing world they’ve come to hate. They are united in anger and there is no revelation, no October surprise, that will deter them from trying to foist their candidate of rage onto the source of their scorn. Instead, the only path to hope in this election rests with those who, despite all that is wrong with this country, care enough to change it rather than blow it up with a middle finger.