Fantasizing about the President-elect
We’ll turn a blind eye to the insincerity and hypocrisy he recently demonstrated and fold him into our collective embrace as if we were Hillary Clinton and he was Bill because we’re stuck in a dysfunctional relationship — I think its called a cycle of abuse — with politics and our politicians.
When Al Gore first conceded, I went into denial: President Shrubbery is no president of mine. I can pretend government doesn’t exist or at least, like so many people in this country who don’t vote, that it isn’t relevant in my life. I thought about burying my head in the sand like an ostrich and not coming out until the country as a whole stopped being so selfish and shortsighted.
Unfortunately, my neck isn’t very long, and I wouldn’t know how to breathe submerged in illusions.
Next, I became vengeful. I fantasized about how President Featherweight’s term in office would be a ridiculous failure — a laughable exercise in bankrupt Republican ideology, trickle-down, voodoo economics, that proved to the overwhelming majority of Americans, once and for all, that any party that needs to make a point of its compassion is hiding something.
Then, I started hallucinating about President Luck-of-the-Chad achieving his goals completely, beyond John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan’s wildest dreams: Privatization of Social Security drains money from the current system and sends countless young workers into life-threatening seizures of anxiety with every corporate announcement of lower-than-expected earnings.
Schools “compete” for vouchers and talented teachers until the losers, the least capital-attractive school districts in the country — the inner-inner cities and the sparsely populated rural areas — don’t even pretend to be anything more than germinating centers for angry, uneducated, starving future residents of the growing jail system.
The economy is run like a game of Monopoly culminating when fifteen people possess all the world’s wealth (That’s still competitive, right?). And they insist on building ugly little red hotels EVERYWHERE just because they can.
I imagined gleefully that in the face of real physical evidence we may finally unite and do something to diminish the size and weight of the manure that has been shoveled our way.
Except, of course, I can’t wish for any of that. I couldn’t bear to see any of those things happen, even for less than four years.
In the end, I resign myself to believing in President Youthful Indiscretions because for as long as he is President I need him to be right and do right: I need to believe that he really does care about education even though Texas seems so bad at educating their own.
I need to believe that all his policies, when implemented, won’t be disastrous. I need to believe that he will be bipartisan even though the last five weeks demonstrated how easily he and his surrogates can demonize anyone who disagrees with them.
Even though he said he believed in local control then used the Federal judiciary to obliterate local authority, I need to believe he isn’t a liar or a cheat or a hypocrite who just gets his kicks wielding whatever power is available. I need my feelings and beliefs to be wrong, and I want his to be right.
If he were a lover, I’d be crazy not to have kicked him to the curb long ago.
And so, ultimately, I wind up like a guest on a political Jerry Springer show: I just can’t help myself, I say, I’m addicted to powerful men. I’m in love with the President, whoever it is, and I can’t stop now.
I tell the studio audience that I know he’s been bad in the past, but he’s promised to change. I want to believe him. I need to believe him. He’s the man. He’s my man. He’s the only president I got. What can I do without him?
The studio audience jeers at me but deep down I expect they know how I feel.
<-- back to writing