For those desperately wishing for presidential candidates other than Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, forget about it. This is as good as it gets, and what's wrong with a vaudevillian and a clown when American politics is a circus, a hilarious, lion-taming, bear-baiting, high wire extravaganza in the first place? Tarts and shills, carny barkers and touts, magicians and fire-breathers.
Who can take it seriously? What future historian will ever deny the side show that passes for American politics today? Enough questions. Point of fact: Trump the tummler and Harris the clown may be no Jefferson or Hamilton, but are still as American as apple pie. Times change, the Wild West, Al Capone, Hollywood, and Las Vegas have gotten in the way of the promise of the early days of the Republic.
Although Jefferson, Hamilton, and Franklin would turn over in their graves if they could see what America has become, they are dead and buried, irrelevant except for the occasional desultory reference on the Fourth of July. America is not their America or your grandfather's; it is a bling and gold-grilled, extravaganza; a glitzy, tinseled, pasties and G-stringed place.
Why should politics be any different? Clowns and mountebanks are everywhere in politics. Jugglers and sword swallowers pass laws, bang cocktail waitresses two at a time, hiss and harangue for justice and civil rights, set up tarts and hookers at the Mayflower, and have the chutzpah to look straight into the lens of the camera and say 'I never had sex with that woman'. Getting fellatioed under the Lincoln desk, flying to Buenos Aires to meet an Argentine firecracker with the cover of 'hiking the Appalachian Trail', defrauding the nation out of thousands in Enron/Bernie Madoff Ponzi schemes - this is America.
Kamala Harris is Pierrot-in-Chief, a political cipher with a klaxon laugh and a jar head, full of platitudes, touting herself like a carny barker hawking freaks at a side show as 'a distinguished woman of color', a faux black woman whose roots are as far from the inner city as the pyramids of Gaza. She expects sympathetic voters to look past her Armani suits and see a bitch from the 'hood in a pimped out Cadillac, all gold chains and bosomy décolleté.
'Get yo' ass up outta here', yelled LaShonda Williams. 'You ain't no sister'; but according to Harris it was all about legacy, not comportment to which LaShonda replied, 'Who the fuck you think you kidding?'
The truth? Harris' bailiwick, not like that poseur Trump, but for months she and her White house flacks lied left and right about the 'cognitive decline' of the President, bald faced lies about his competence, his clarity, and his command, covering up the doddering, hopeless old man until it was time to push him under the bus.
A palace coup, but Kamala was no Richard III, an Übermensch, seducing Lady Anne whose husband and father-in-law, the king of England, he had just murdered; killing the princes in the tower and everyone else in sight. She eased the old guy out, knew what she was doing from the moment the two of them sat down in the White House, propped him up in public, dismissed him in private, then dumped him. Oh, she is a vixen all right, one of the cackling Weird Sisters of Macbeth, a succubus in court, the eviscerating terror when it came to denying the confirmation of Justice Kavanagh.
Donald Trump by comparison is just a comedian, a Borscht Belt Jackie Mason or Henny Youngman, quick with one-liners, crude imitations, sendups of everyone north of Jackson. He is a true American, a showman, the one who knows that Sturm und Drang beats careful parsing of executive policies and the do's and don'ts of legislative debate any day of the week. His supporters hear what he means not what he says, but enjoy the bombast, the braggadocio, the sheer chutzpah of the man, a one-man band, a master of legerdemain and sound-and-light.
What is America if not image and fakery? We have come about as far from the Enlightenment as any country can possibly come; as far from the top hats, morning suits, and Victorian parlors of English House of Lords' civility as the Man in the Moon; as distant from academia, high culture, and philosophy as.....well, there really is no comparison. We are a nation of rubes, upstarts, low-bourgeois bar fighters who deserve Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
'A sucker is born every minute', said P.T. Barnum - you can fool most of the people most of the time, so from magic tricks to the billion dollar schemes of the crookedest of Wall Street shysters, there will always be shell games, creative financial 'instruments', and get-rich-quick schemes. We are not a nation of tricksters - most Americans still go to church and believe what they hear from the pulpit - but admire those who can fool the pants off of someone with more money than they should have. Slipping on a banana peel is all it is, but there it is too - our ethos.
Democracy is the worst political system possible, said Winston Churchill, except for all the rest, and the downside of America's opportunism and devil-may-care scramble to the top is fraud - there really is no way to sugarcoat it; but one has only to look at the shenanigans of Congress and the White House, the lies, the coverups, the chicanery, and the balderdash to why deception is part and parcel of the American way.
The moral of the story is: be happy with Trump and Harris. It's not that we should be able to do better than that. They are better than that. They are the best we've got because in their clownish, outlandish personalities, they are 'one of us, one of us'
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