Rally

 August 14, 2024

The Orange Menace holds a rally downtown today. Not going any closer than I am now. I know I’m not the only one to be excited and energized by the Harris/Walz ticket. They give me something to campaign for, rather than merely something to strive against. I hope our joy doesn’t make us complacent, for the horror of another Trump presidency still looms, if perhaps not quite so darkly. Donald Trump is the single worst person in American political history. This proposition can be denied, but it can’t really be disputed. We can look back on a colorful array of bigots, racists, robber-barons, war-mongers, thieves, xenophobes, liars, sociopaths and slobs, but never (in my knowledge) has there been one who rolled all possible political vices together into one toxic package. . .  and had within his grasp the power to put them into lethal effect. Never before was one who came so close to permanently blurring the difference between truth and falsehood, who came so close to slandering American institutions (the DOJ, NATO, voting, etc) into irrelevancy, who came so close to reviving on this side of the Atlantic the Old World concept of a fascist cult of personality. This perplexes because it is the most unattractive personality imaginable, rapist, liar, grasping (if unsuccessful) plutocrat, incontinent glutton. His being a failure at everything to which he set his hand doesn’t seem to keep people from equating him with Christ. In these latter days add “senile” to the list. Maybe he’s a good dad. Christopher Tolkien (I think it was, or maybe JRR himself) was asked the question, “Who was more evil, Sauron or Melkor?” The answer was that Sauron was slightly less evil, for at one point he had served another. Our disgraced and felonious ex-president has never served anyone but himself, and never will. To his credit, he makes no secret of this. His intention to end American Democracy is repeated often enough that not all of it can be attributed to incipient dementia.  Those who vote for him do so knowing (or having every opportunity to know) that he holds them in contempt.