The Witness Chronicles, September 22, 2024
The girls, and the boys, just want to have fun
Are Americans Finally Tired of Being Angry at Everything?
My radar says we are about ready have some fun
Or, at least, some relief.
We all know the story about the boy who cried wolf so many times that people stopped listening. We’ve reached peak wolf crying in this election but the right can’t stop and it’s getting boring.
It worked for Trump eight years ago. He correctly gauged the mood of the country and the hidden racism and the fear behind it, and knew that if he fanned the flames more would join in. And it got him elected, but it also unleashed his inherent narcissism, and that ego fixation made it impossible for him to admit to losing or being wrong about anything.
If you can’t admit that you might be wrong, you can’t learn anything. And why would you care if you were certain you already knew everything? And herein lies the problem the Republicans face in November. Their candidates can’t change gears or go with the flow, so we get to this point where all they can do is turn up the volume on the same old stuff.
Before Harris came in, that wall of noise composed of hate, fear, and vindictiveness was drowning out Joe Biden’s attempts to fight back with reason. But in Harris we have something completely different, a confident and highly competent woman who completely understands men like Trump and Vance, who fear people like her.
And she is using the one thing they really fear which is ridicule and laughter aimed right at them. And now their steady stream of invective, having lost its bite, offers up an endless stream of opportunities to make fools of them.
Narcissists are not known for their sense of humor. They take themselves far too seriously for that. But when Donald Trump came on the political scene he appeared to be enjoying himself, mostly because he was showered constantly with attention, 24/7.
So his followers created a cult around his rallies and he thrived. But there is a problem with an addiction to attention. Attention spans are short and it is human nature to want change. And it looks like the country wants to move on and get past all this angry melodrama.
On weekends, the US national news cycle is largely taken over by pundits and opinions. On PBS, Fox, and CNN, on the network Sunday morning shows, and over cable and streaming. I watch a lot of it, more than I should, and I’ve been hearing a new thread of speculation about the direction of the race.
People are picking up on both this fatigue with the negative and the readiness to lighten things up and get back to looking forward and enjoying ourselves a bit in the process.
The problem with placing Trump and his hardcore followers in the ‘boy who cried wolf' story is that in the story the wolf showed up but no one was there to defend the boy because they had stopped listening. In Trump’s case there is no wolf, no criminal immigrant hordes of pet eating brown people.
Even the great bogeyman of Inflation has left the room with good news on all fronts. Gas prices are dropping, interest rates are dropping, the financial markets are hitting all time highs, and the inflation number has dropped from a high of 9% after Covid to 2.5% today.
The immigration and border security issues are still serious, but Trump stumbled badly here when he ordered his lackeys in Congress to kill a bipartisan bill funding major changes that would have gone a long way towards getting things under control.
That was a classic case of not thinking the longer term consequences of a decision through.Trump’s order and the shameful kowtowing in the House to him gave Democrats a potent weapon when they are accused of weakness on these immigration issues.
They can and are using it against Trump’s increasingly shrill and hilariously exaggerated claims about the dangers we face, claims that get more and more far-fetched every day. Trump once smiled and mocked his opponents but these days we just get scowls and complaints.
Every day we hear more and more blatantly racial fear mongering and most of it makes no sense. When Trump spoke this week at a Jewish conference on anti-semitism, he threatened all Jews with the consequences for them if he loses.
I’m sorry, but that may have been peak weird Trumpian logic to threaten a voter constituency, in their own territory, when you desperately need every vote you can get. And he does this at every turn these days, lashing out over and over again, but it is falling flat.
I’ve got a gut feeling that we are ready to walk away from all that, and I’m not alone. At least that’s what the grapevine is starting to say. I hope we’re right.
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