"Do you think it'll stay this way?"
"No. No, I don't."
-- Jerry Seinfeld on the weather
It is a long way until November, and it doesn't make that much difference anyway. Maybe it gets better. What we may be seeing is the last stand of a certain kind of American paranoiac, the kind who believes the world has taken notice of and set itself against him. The sort that imagines conspiracies and persecutions; the miserly sort who imagines that every gain achieved by someone else costs him.
These people aren't especially numerous, but they are especially noisy--they seem to have the time to haunt social media and to call into radio talk shows. They're the ones driven to confrontation, to rude gestures and the monkeywrenching of productive conversations. Some of them are especially susceptible to the fear-mongering of certain cynical politicians; some of them just weren't raised right.
But despite their fury and petulance, and the admittedly undue attention paid to them by people like me, they won't decide this election. Given their fatalism, it wouldn't be surprising if a lot of them don't even vote.
People who are distressed that America is becoming less and less like the fictional Mayberry, N.C., should understand that we were never a monolithic country, and if your childhood seemed idyllic it's not because the world was better in those days, it's because you were insulated from trouble by the people who took care of you. Every era has its problems, and progress is inevitable.
The streets are less dangerous now than they were in 1982. And some people are freer. That freedom upsets some folks, the kind who don't especially like to see men holding hands or women in hijab because they didn't see these things in the nonexistent good old days when black folks knew to keep in their place.
This might not be the end of white male hegemony in this country, but you can see it from here. A full 30 percent of the electorate is non-white; about 52 percent is female. What some folks are calling the Rising American Electorate --a group comprising unmarried women, non-white voters and millennials--will likely make up more than 50 percent of the voters this November. (These groups make up nearly 57 percent of the population that's eligible to vote but as of 2014, 42 percent of them--and more than half of millennials--weren't registered to vote.)
So angry white dudes are already outnumbered. (That's one of the things they're angry about.) And while they still control a lot of the money and what the Commies used to call the "means of production" in their country, their influence will invariably wane. And as their influence wanes, we're likely to hear lots of howls, threats and loud complaints. But in the end we've still got a republic (if we can keep it), and the present political drama will be succeeded by some other political drama. We'll always have things to fight about, but most of them won't have much effect on the way most people who've achieved a comfortable place in the world live their lives. Their taxes and 401(k)s may go up or down.
What makes this election cycle seem more important than most is the presence of a demagogue who achieved a level of success running an authoritarian playbook similar to the one that carried certain Europeans to power in the 1930s. And because a lot of Americans don't know much about history, it seems pretty important to keep pointing out the congruities between the con man behind a lousy lifestyle brand and Herr Schicklgruber, who at one time was thought to be a pretty ridiculous figure as well.
(Actually the better comparison would be Italy's Benito Mussolini, who had a similarly confused set of policies. For, as Walter Sobchak told the Dude, while you can "say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism . . . at least it's an ethos." But I'm told that's a dangerously nuanced position to present a general audience. You might as well make reference to Buzz Windrip.)
On the other hand, there's only so much a president can do. Maybe put the economy in the ditch. Maybe get himself impeached. Maybe discover there are limits to bullying. The truth is he might be more dangerous as a candidate than as a president--all his talk of "rigged" elections and what "Second Amendment people" might do could actually get people hurt.
But as inescapable as this all seems now, in a year it will seem like a dream. In five years it'll be forgotten, and the real danger is that we mightn't learn anything from it. We have real problems--a growing divide between the people who have a genuine stake in the country and those living from paycheck to paycheck; the inability of us to agree on a common reality constructed on facts rather than wishfulness--and our reluctance to engage them has already placed perhaps insoluble burdens on future generations.
Yet the world still offers delight. There are ways to ring the senses. You can love and be loved. You can seek and find cause for amazement in the stars and clouds. And in your studied smallness maybe experience a connection to the great ongoing thrum of the universe. Know you're but a spark, a flash across an undying blackness, and feel awe.
Our world is mortal too; it will someday be ruined and lonely, waiting in the dark for searching beams which may never come. And if they come, perhaps they'll linger but for a moment, wondering at the strangeness of our kind. Why did we shout so much at one another? Why were we so afraid?
There's no good answer. So like Dan Rather said, "Courage." And try to breathe.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 08/16/2016