He's Not Funny, Folks

A comedian friend of mine used to say when evaluating a colleague, “I know funny, and he isn’t.” Is anyone really enjoying Donald Trump? If I hear one more person say, “Isn’t it great how he’s shaking things up?”… No, I’d better not say what I might do.

Let’s see, he’s given us Mexican rapists crossing the border, John McCain not being a war hero, and the cell phone number of a fellow Republican he disagrees with. If Mr. Rogers were here, he’d be channeling Rick Perry: “Can you say, ‘Commander-in-Chief’?”

That’s not just a snarky comment. Donald Trump is showing us what kind of battles he picks – and one of the biggest jobs a U.S. president has is picking battles. If the battles Trump has been picking represent what he thinks will win him the presidency, what kind will he pick if he were actually elected? (A concept which is, thankfully, very remote).

In the case of McCain, one could actually make a semantic argument over the use of the word “hero,” though anyone who spends years as a POW has to be given some credit for simply surviving. And, of course, Trump never had to serve one minute in the armed forces, so he doesn’t have the standing to even raise that issue.

This is about judgment. I actually wouldn’t have minded if McCain had become president himself – but he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, or at least let others pick her for him. What did that say about his judgment? I didn’t think anyone could possibly make me miss Sarah Palin, but Mr. Trump has done it. The sexist pig in me says she is much nicer to look at.

In a perfect media world (that I controlled) I would cease on principle to give Donald Trump one more second of airtime, drop of ink, or digital keystroke. Don’t we have better things to do? Can’t somebody just make him go away?

As for Trump “shaking things up” in the GOP, is the party, or the nation, that bored? I live in California, but I don’t sit around longing for the next earthquake. They usually just cause damage. And Trump is just shaking the surface anyway. The Republican Party needs to be shaken to its foundation if it expects to survive this Trump, or future Trumps – or survive, period.

Bookends

In about a month, I will have officially logged another year on Earth, and there have been quite a few of them. This being Throwback Thursday, it’s simply a reminder that we Boomers have a lot more backward time “in the can” than forward time left. But it also means we’ve been alive long enough now to see what seems like the beginning and the end of big things – bookends, if you like.

Many of us are talking this morning about Caitlyn Jenner, who won the Arthur Ashe Courage Award last night on ABC. I must confess that when I first heard about this earlier in the day, I did an eye-roll. But the “preview” piece about Bruce Jenner’s struggle to accept him (now her) self, followed by Caitlyn’s moving speech crafted to persuade others to accept trans people, moved me. Perhaps I was moved because I was alive in the Bruce Olympian days – the first bookend – which is just “the past” to some younger people for whom history is not a favorite subject. But even for young people, “transes” were the butt of jokes just a few months ago. Not anymore.

Then there is Pluto. I have been alive long enough to remember the consternation in this country over the Russians getting into space first (Sputnik, 1957). I also remember our manned spacecraft circling the moon on a Christmas Eve, with one astronaut reading Bible verses while the Earth was in the background on our black-and-white TV, and then our guys landing on the moon a relatively short time later. And now, our spacecraft flying by this ex-planet several billion miles away, and sending back pictures.

President Obama is calling this week for major prison reform, and to that end, commuted the sentences of almost 50 nonviolent drug offenders. I’ve been around long enough to remember when possessing even a tiny amount of marijuana for personal use could get you a very long time in the slammer, and that marijuana was considered eeeevil.

(Now if they could only do something about immigration. I’d like to see a bookend on that one.)

If we’re around long enough, these “bookend” events really stand out to us. But our very lives are bookends: they start somewhere and end somewhere else. We just have to remember that these big stories began before we were born and will continue on after we die.

I’m glad that I have lived long enough (so far) to have one foot in the relatively distant past and the other here, to see all these changes. Do most older people feel that way?

Many of us thought the year 2012, according to the Mayan calendar, would mark the end of the world. Well, maybe it did, but we didn’t finish the phrase: it was just the end of the world as we thought we knew it.

Irresistible

I had nothing in particular on the agenda one day, so I considered watching paint dry. It’s the definition of boring, because I know I can’t see it happening. I may even get a little impatient with the time it takes, but I trust the process, at the end of which I can move on to use the thing that was once wet.

Life’s processes often take much longer. I drove through L.A. this past week, and noticed that I could see the surrounding mountains. This used to be a rarity years ago because of the smog. But now, generations of cleaner-burning cars have filled the roads. There are so many of them – it’s Southern California – that I didn’t get anywhere fast, but at least the scenery was nicer than it used to be. The clearer skies seemed like a sudden event, because I don’t live in L.A.

The past couple of weeks in this country have been dazzling indeed. “Sea change” doesn’t begin to do it all justice. Same-sex marriage is now legal, and Confederate flags are being erased from view. The U.S. and Cuba have agreed to open embassies on their respective soils. Those still alive in future decades will be telling grandchildren where they were when the news of these things broke.

But unless we live with a process daily, we forget that it took an enormous struggle for these things to happen. In the case of gay marriage, it started with Stonewall in New York almost half a century ago, followed by hundreds of legal and social battles. It was just plain time for the Supreme Court to do what it did.

Since the end of the Civil War, the Confederate flag has been a symbol that most Americans have tolerated as a quirky Southern historical symbol, one that many Southerners still embrace. Now it is a symbol of racial oppression. The Civil War was a necessary event, but of course, it didn’t settle everything. We often forget that the process seemed to begin with the Abolitionist movement that started decades before in New England -- all of this leading up to 2015.

And Americans will soon be traveling to Cuba in large numbers, and vice versa. It seems like yesterday that Cuba was a mortal enemy, once a direct threat to our survival. But the thawing of hostility was a half-century process, and people actually had to get old or die off to allow it to happen.

Evolution is a logical and methodical process, but it’s usually long, sometimes invisible, and almost always painful, even on an individual level. Someone we thought of as a close friend evolves into a different person. It may be time for a connection to end, but we may resist the process, not recognizing that we have changed too. Evolution is inevitable, and resisting it often results in pain. Not everyone is pleased with the outcome, at least for the moment.

But if you are allowed to stay on this planet long enough, the threads become more and more visible. You begin to see how the dots connect. A little knowledge of history helps you accept, and hopefully appreciate, the process when it involves positive movement. And you realize that a milestone is just a marker on what is a very long path.