There was a debate last night.
Because of the need to write this column in advance of its publication, I'm guessing I watched at least some of it. I'm pretty sure that by the time you read this--which I hope is first thing on Tuesday morning--I'll be all caught up. Maybe something happened that will change a lot of people's minds. Maybe front pages all over America are exploding this morning. But I kind of doubt it.
My feeling is it doesn't matter who "won" the made-for-TV spectacle; you've already made up your mind. And you're probably not all that enthusiastic about your candidate. You're probably more motivated by what you perceive as the threat the other candidate presents. Or you're planning to advertise your higher morality by voting for one of the third party candidates. (I understand that; in the 1980 presidential election I came very close to voting for a man named John B. Anderson.)
I don't really care what you do. I'm not even going to say you have a duty to vote. Because I think not voting can be a valid form of political expression. You no more have to vote than you have to stand for the National Anthem or pledge allegiance to the flag. This is America, where you get to follow your own conscience.
It's not that I don't think this election is important; for once I might agree with the bloviators who say it's the most important election of my lifetime. This is the first election where I feel the soul of the nation is at stake. We might be as susceptible to the racist and xenophobic carny bark of would-be dictators as anyone else. We might be as scaredy as the rest of the world. We may no longer be willing to walk the walk as the world's last best hope. We might be ordinary people. We might not be great.
My lifetime record in presidential elections isn't good. I've been on the losing side more often than my candidate has won. But I never worried about whether America could actually survive the other guy being elected. I'm not worried about that now. But if Donald Trump is elected--which I still think is unlikely--things will change drastically. Not for the better. At the very least, he'll have demonstrated that celebrity and vividness of character can be sufficient to win high office.
Arkansas is very likely going to go for Trump, not because people like him all that much but because the anti-Clinton sentiment runs so deep here. And regardless of who wins this election, our children and grandchildren will be embarrassed by that, just as some of us are embarrassed by the difficulties some of our parents and grandparents had reconciling themselves to a world that didn't automatically defer to white folks.
If you've got a problem with the browning of America, I don't know what to tell you, son. White folks will be in the minority before long; this might be the last election where a candidate can get pretty far without significant support from non-white (and non-heterosexual male) Americans. That doesn't mean that Trump is the last great white hope to come down the pike, only that future demagogues are likely to have a subtler, less brazen rhetoric. We're always going to be susceptible to those who offer simple solutions to complex problems.
One of the problems we have is that many of us are low-information voters--watch a couple of hours of the cable news channel of your choice and you can probably count yourself as part of an elite. I've had a couple of people jump ugly with me this cycle because I suggested that they probably shouldn't accept Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow's take as scripture--and I'm afraid the meanie commentators ran one ol' boy clean off the Facebook after he posted something on my timeline about how he was "tired of facts and science" and intended to just rely on "common sense" this cycle. You don't get far suggesting that people ought to smarten up but these days, when some teachers say you can't assign high schoolers to read books above a fourth- or fifth-grade reading level, it's hard not to wonder if a failing education system hasn't contributed to the mess in which we find ourselves.
There was a debate last night. I'm sure a lot of people watched. They got their popcorn ready. Maybe they were disappointed, maybe they got the red meat they wanted. (Maybe Gennifer Flowers showed up anyway.)
As for me, I intend to vote as soon as they let me. I want to put this cycle behind and start paying attention to other things. (Bruce Springsteen's autobiography is out today. And, like Ronnie Wood once almost said, I've got my own stuff to do.) I'm tired of the vitriol and the adolescent fantasies of instant experts who get their history from cable news minutes, Hollywood and bumper stickers--and the whining by folks who, quite honestly, don't have it that all bad.
Whatever you think of these candidates and their relative merits (and Hillary Clinton might only be electable in a race with a reality TV candidate), the truth is both of our major political parties did a poor job of presenting us with options this year. Clinton was the pre-ordained choice of an exhausted system, while Trump took advantage of the Republican long-standing campaign against governance itself.
I wouldn't mind seeing both parties splinter and seeing us move toward a more European model of government, with a number of parties vying for significant roles in the government. Americans are naturally divided into two camps, and breaking the two parties' monopoly on power could only be good thing.
Maybe we should debate that.
------------v------------
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 09/27/2016