 "In my life, I have watched John Kennedy
talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson
look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, "And we
shall overcome." I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell
the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw
Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a
shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the
eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the
survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw
George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11,
2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing "Amazing Grace" in the wounded
sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South
Carolina.
These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect
men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of
them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the
podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate
to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the
presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings.
They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried
nonetheless.
And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience
of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered
when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma
she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes,
a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can
put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of
suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an
office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust
that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.
The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the
parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A
vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And
a cheap, soulless bully besides.
Watch him make fun of the woman again. Watch how a republic dies
in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own
imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency
simply to shut the fuck up even when it is in his best interest
to do so. Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good
presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our
common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our
political commonwealth, too.
Watch him again, behind the seal of the President of the United
States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady
hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only
story now."
Charles Patrick Pierce is an American sportswriter, political
blogger, liberal pundit author, and game show panelist. |
