Hi folks,
Longtime readers may recall my promise to protect your sanity - 300 words a day, on average, with certain exceptions to enable longer posts on Sundays. Well, today's news is that we once again drifted north of the target. The numbers don't lie - after Sunday's book-length post, I can officially report that TOA is so far over its word count budget that I would need to go on holiday until next Friday to get back in black.
The good news is "TOA Rewind" was invented just for this problem - I post a few words, bringing down the word count, but I include a link to many more words, appeasing both my readers and non-readers; this is how it works. And I think I have a good candidate for a few days, maybe ten - "Make America Debate Again", a series I put together in 2016 where I debated myself as I considered the Massachusetts ballot questions. I reread the posts again recently and I was pleasantly surprised; I stand by all of it, and I should, since there is no point to having a debate unless the participants take ownership for their remarks.
Anyway, the reason I originally wrote the posts four years ago is that I was coming to a strange realization - we had a presidential candidate who I scored a zero in almost every category, yet I knew some of the qualities that made him so appealing to voters were the same ones that I liked, and even prized, about myself. The easy thing to do here is to claim that this is what I mean when I reference The Business Bro, which I see as some combination of qualities that includes authenticity and vision, but of course this isn't strictly true. Isn't it pretty easy to imagine Trump on stage calling some inept CEO by the same label? It takes one to know one, some may suggest, but that self-deprecating part of me is also blissfully unaware of the unintended consequences of doing the right thing. The point of these posts from 2016 was partly a clumsy attempt to put this all together, and unify the contradictory aspects of my nature; it was also a way to both acknowledge and distance myself from certain qualities that I recognized could easily work against me, primarily by finding key details that brought nuance to where two-party politics demands obedience through simplicity.
It's not so clear why I think it's worth reposting these now (outside of it being a solution to my previously stated budget crisis). It's certainly not my clever response to last week's presidential debate. I don't have any illusions about the power of satire, or in this case its rough approximation, because satire always has a certain dark quality in the way it reels the most urgent part of reality back to the pack of the easily dismissed irrelevances that define most of life. Longtime readers will recall I have no interest in debates of any kind, again for a similar reason to the above - debates have the power to balance all points along some roughly equal scale, even if one factor is so significant it should outweigh any and all counterpoints. So although I remain unsure about exactly why I'm reposting these now, I can assure you it's not some complicated attempt to make a clever point about last week's debate in some indirect, artistic, and therefore bullshit way.
But of course, just in case there is any confusion, I'll make my point in a direct way.
If a presidential candidate cannot respond with any clarity to a question about white supremacy - if the response is such that newspapers are soberly reporting the next day about someone's "position" on white supremacy, as if it were a matter of civilized, serious speculation - then in my mind there is nothing to talk about the next day except for the response; the other concerns regarding the debate are irrelevant. If your reaction to last week's debate didn't start and end with "stand back and stand by", then I'm sure you are also routinely confused about the role of Nice People in the systemic racism of America, or even about the fact of systemic racism; the politest way to say it is you are busying yourself rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. Let me clarify your confusion. If you are still talking about the interruptions, the chaos, or the moderator, my recommendation to you is to find a quiet place to sit, maybe with a mirror, and think for a few minutes about what you are doing when you talk about something other than "stand back and stand by", as if anything else were remotely relevant about the first debate; the truth is that the debate you found so confusing was crystal-clear to white supremacists, they had no trouble understanding it, and if for some reason you are still thinking otherwise, still going on about interruptions or Chris Wallace or the urgent need for a revised debate format, then maybe you are too comfortable with your place in Donald Trump's dream of an America made great again.
