At the most very basic level, say, down on your hands and knees and squinting through the cosmic mouse hole at Mar-a-Lago, or down a dark tunnel into the kaleidoscope of painfully pulsing lights that surround the clown circus that is the Trump presidency, it’s probably just a simple question of karma.
It’s not about Democrats or Republicans being good or bad, and as spectacularly narcissistic as Donald Trump is, as much as he appears to be unhinged from fiscal, moral, intellectual and perhaps physical reality, consider the possibility that it’s not really about him. It’s about us. All of us.
Karma is not about punishment and reward. It’s about cause and effect. Like an ocean wave, karma doesn’t give a flying frog whether you pray or don’t pray, whether you are nice to others, whether you tithe at church and walk your dog every day. When the tsunami alarm goes off and you run down to the shore to see it, and it wipes all trace of you off the face of the planet, that’s just karma. Maybe you’ll come back as a mayfly and help Steve Kyle catch a steelhead. Maybe you’ll come back as a steelhead. If Steve Kyle catches you he’ll probably let you go because Steve Kyle understands steelhead karma.
In fact, most of the reason there are still steelhead in our rivers – even in Sonoma Creek – is because the people who catch them understand they have to be released or they’ll stop coming back, maybe even stop existing. Letting the steelhead go is a product of understanding what steelhead are about, it’s a product of understanding that, even if you catch something, you can’t necessarily keep it.
Donald Trump enjoys letting people flatter him that he should run for an unconstitutional third term. He likes it when text trees start circulating promoting the idea that his gilded visage should be added to Mt. Rushmore. Like courtesans of the emperor who dons invisible new clothes for a grand parade, Trumps enablers fuel his fantasy for a multi-million-dollar military parade to celebrate his birthday. And he likes it when people don’t snicker (at least not in his presence or in proximity to a microphone or camera) when he, himself, suggests he just may be the greatest president in history. Clearly he wants those things to happen – the perpetual presidency, the monuments, the recognition and esteem he craves but doesn’t deserve and can never really have.
Let’s call it what it is: Crazy Shit. Donald Trump is truly crazy, and will go down in history as the worst, and most incompetently dangerous president going back to the Founding Fathers and forward to perhaps Obi-Wan Kenobi. Worst by orders of magnitude of badness. Having caught the ultimate political brass ring, Trump can’t accept he has to give it back so someone else can hold it. He would be a terrible steelhead fisherman. But how did he happen? And what’s karma got to do with it?
Political pundits, solons, revered historians, professional pols and statistical gurus have picked apart the carcass of the 2024 presidential election until only its gleaming bones have yet to be digested.
At least one consensus holds that poorly educated, blue-collar Americans resent the educated elite and warmed to Trump’s populist, ignorant-strong-man rant. There’s probably truth in that assumption. But it’s unfair to the uneducated Americans who are not nearly as stupid as the educated elite may think they are. Although the Culture Wars clearly factor into the karmic equation.
What we are learning in today’s cyclonic political/social/digital/economic climate is that style is more important than substance, that grievance grows like cultured cannabis in the garden of competing cultural agendas that blend gender, race, religion, language, wealth and poverty into a lush tangle of interlocking branches and leaves, all competing for sunshine and oxygen.
This was all bound to happen, because the complexity of interweaving disparate interests, with so many interest holders, may have exceeded our national bandwidth. So many differences, so much complexity. Sometimes you just have to throw up hands in frustration and follow the guy with the simplest, loudest and most confident voice.
Thomas Jefferson (pictured), among many other thinkers and prominent minds, observed that, “The government you elect is the government you deserve.” Not everyone accepts that sentiment, denying any agency in the autocratic actions of the Trump presidency. But 77,302,580 people voted for him. A significant percentage still follow him, even as, like the German children in the village of Hamelin who followed the Pied Piper out of town, he leads all of us over a cliff.
Again, karma.
The culture wars that may ultimately define the Trump presidency, will not go away. They may ebb and flow, but as long as the issues that drive them remain unresolved and inadequately discussed – a race-based, slave-holding history; confusion and anger about gender rights and trans realities, and a radically imbalanced distribution of wealth – they will continue. Because they are real. Just like karma.
Jefferson was an uncertain oddsmaker while helping birth this country. “We act not for ourselves,” he wrote, “but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to show whether man can be trusted with self- government.”
To which we may want to ask ourselves, if not here, where? If not now, when?
Such an an astute and somewhat humorous editorial, we are lucky to have you as editor here….telling it like it is….thank you!