~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I reacted to a speech last week with a sense of foreboding. It was blasted out by the GOP hopeful against the Democratic presumptive nominee for President of the United States.
At first, I was simply stunned by the bellowing, distracted from the beginnings of a perfectly good nap. I sat up as I heard the hate. And it was after looking at a couple of fact-checking sites that I was able to pick out the lies.
The foreboding, the dread came some time later. It came after supper as I was sitting on the couch engrossed, I thought, in a novel called Chicago (by Brian Doyle). The narrator in the book is soft-spoken, in a state of wonder at living in Chicago for the first time, surrounded by people different from any he’s known but whom he accepts, with their warts and weirdities and even some of them ignoring him. The narrator is young, early twenties, so he is not yet cynical; he is funny and wry, gentle in his candid opinions of old Mayor Daley, the potholed streets, the preponderance of hardcore gangs.
It must have been the completely opposing management of words — the belligerent speech versus the benign book — that made my stomach churn because of a fearful future: a bellicose, blundering, exaggerating, vain possible next president of the U.S.
Four more months of this harangue against the press, foreigners, women, religions? Imagine four years. Clear sound recordings flash in my mind of being badgered by this voice for the next half a decade. Can you imagine a Democrat — or for that matter, a Republican — in Congress who does not vote the way he wants her to? A major ally who asks him a hard question? Not to dare think about a possible enemy that he could annoy to war with a Tweet.
There is a meanness about him as well as an uncouthness. I have no idea if he is physically aggressive, but there is a battering pugnacity in him that makes me back up and want to leave the room.
In the meantime, on my kitchen table, is another book I’m reading — 20th Century Journey by William Shirer. This is a history by an American correspondent in Germany in the 1930s during the build-up to the Second World War. Throughout the book he includes parts of Adolph Hitler’s speeches, all of which are endless repetition of venom, untruths, self-aggrandizement and anger. Although the kindness of the Chicago book after the unkindness of the Republican’s speech hit me, I believe it is this history book, subtitled “The Nightmare Years,” that influenced me to think of the GOP guy with dread.
Economist Dean Baker from the Center for Economic and Policy Research in DC said, “There is no excuse for supporting a racist, sexist, zenophobic buffoon…. But we should be clear; the workers who turn to him do have real grievances. The system has been rigged against them.”
To me, this says that rather than take on immigrants, women and Mexicans, let’s take on at least one of the super wealthy, like the GOP presumptive nominee, who likes to remind us, “I am very rich.”
My reaction to conflict is usually to run away; in this case, turn off the speeches that might offend my tender ears and forget about politics. But that’s cowardice; especially in a representative democracy where we get to vote. Although I believe most of us have made up our minds about the coming election, and if the candidates were smart, they’d leave us alone, if the man who “loves the poorly educated” continues, I guess I shall too. If one thinks she has to speak up against a bully, I guess she’d better do it.
