Saturday, March 18, 2017

I gotta quit Trump

I gotta quit Trump. This whole Trump thing is interfering with my sleep. My meditation. My exercise routine. It's making me wake up every morning in a welter of anxiety and driving me into a rage several times a day. It's raising my blood pressure and making me fat.

It's gotta stop.

I'm sure I'm not the only who feels every day like they are living in a novel penned by Kafka. The outrages and absurdities just keep piling up. White supremacists rule in the White House writing executive orders expressly designed to harm people. Trump accuses his predecessor of a felony; his inane "advisor" claims surveillance by microwave oven. "Exhausted" secretary of state Rex Tillerson puts the nuclear option on the table regarding North Korea. The proposed health care law and budget take America back to the dark ages, cutting arts, science, environmental and safety protections, education. President Trump lies through his teeth EVERY. SINGLE. BLOODY. DAY.

Seriously, if someone pitched this to Hollywood as a movie script 30 years ago, they would have been laughed out of the room. But someone should have pitched it, and made the movie, because then maybe we would not be living it now. (I can see it as a Sacha Baron Cohen effort: "American President Borat". It would have made millions.)

Even as a reality show it's impossible not to watch. The suspense is unbearable: will the FBI nail Trump & Co. before they do irreparable damage? Will the Muslim ban stand? Will Neil Gorsuch be nominated and up-end the balance in the Supreme Court? Will the Republicans succeed in repealing Obamacare and replacing it with Ryan's hybrid monster-child of a healthcare act? Will Big Bird and the EPA be axed? Will Trump supporters ever see the light, get to the breaking point, and vote against the new and improved swamp? And, seriously, if things get bad enough, will the military and the intelligence agencies step in to remove the president before he starts a nuclear war? It would not be a good thing, politically speaking, but the way things are going, it's not something I would count out.

All this makes it very hard to quit Trump and especially hard to quit Twitter, where all the breaking news, real and imagined, can be found. I have a feeling that when things unravel, they will unravel fast, and I want to be there to catch the news when they do. Every day I look to see whether President Trump has quit, been arrested, or ordered impeached. I look morning, noon, and night, and I feed on the intriguing tidbits presented by @20committee, @LouiseMensch, and @maddow, and @KeithOlbermann's juicy rants. But all this keeps me in a state of high dudgeon 24/7 and makes it difficult to sleep. Sometimes I even forget to eat. My friends call it an obsession; I am pretty sure that it's a mental illness now affecting a lot of Americans.

To qualify: I am a history major and the daughter of a woman who had to spend years in hiding during the Second World War. In the first capacity I am keenly aware of political threats of historical magnitude. Make no mistake: Trump is one. In the second, some part of my limbic brain has identified Trump as an existential threat to my own survival. I am watching him the way a small animal watches a predator from hiding. I am watching him and his dangerous tribe, and also the apex predators circling him who might take him down. I am rooting for my kind, the millions of other small animals living in the forest, and I find it impossible to look away because all our lives might depend on what happens next.

So I can't quit Trump.

No comments:

Post a Comment