#19 - Suburban Dad for President
I find it shameful and unfair that our political landscape has reduced us to the point of collective desperation where we are yearning for somebody normal and electable to run for president.
What is “normal,” exactly? Well, according to even me at this moment in time, it’s a cisgender middle-aged white guy with no huge skeletons in his closet. Maybe an affair or two, but that’s par for the course.
I’ve been thinking about this all morning and this feels like a conspiracy to me — to beleaguer the ordinary, but aspirational public so much that we opt into regression, leaping and bounding back to the status quo, abandoning our big and wild dreams to have, I don’t know, another person of color as president, or a WOMAN.
For fuck’s sake, America. Was this the plan all along?
I’m not a fan of what happened yesterday. Generally, I am not a fan of people’s ears (or heads) getting blown off. I find the level of shock around the attempted assassination of the former president baffling though, as this man himself has repeatedly used violent rhetoric during rallies and turned a blind eye to violence being inflicted on others, including law enforcement personnel sworn to protect the Capitol.
Are people really surprised that the country is at a boiling point?
And he’s not the only one. This predilection for violence cuts across generations and political parties. The United States is complicit in countless deaths during its failed military excursions and arms dealings abroad in recent decades. This includes 35,000 reported civilian deaths in Gaza, a number thought to be far from the actual body count.
I love my country deeply, but I am not sure what it stands for right now. Perhaps the only thing that came out of that pompadoured pipsqueak Vivek Ramaswamy’s mouth that I agreed with was that America is having an identity crisis. He was right about about that. We don’t know who we are right now.
So for now I’ll surrender to time because that’s the prudent thing to do when you’re heartbroken. But also maybe pushing a cart slowly through the khaki shorts and beef patty aisles at Costco, and loitering with intent around Blackstone griddles will make me feel better. For there, I will surely spot a messiah.