We woke up Wednesday to extraordinarily discover, that waterfalls now flow upward, the sun sets weekends at noon, thst frogs have hairy eyebrows and travel by roller skates, that the official New Year occurs in August, that squirrels hate acorns, jelly apples are composed of flavored tennis balls, that men’s hair combs are made of black licorice, and that Donald Trump, an egocentric neurotic with a shameful record of two impeachments, thirty-four criminal convictions and a plethora of criminal indictments, an adjudicated rapist and tax defrauder, a treasonous confidant of Vladimir Putin and other enemy tyrants, an egocentric neurotic, evincing a complete lack of moral compass, a visibly unhinged, bigoted, immoral, incapable, serial mendacious, Donald J.Trump, the champion of price-elevating tariffs, mass deportations. unrestricted oil drilling, opponent of health and environmental regulations, notably, a rebuker of the Nation’s foundational Constitution, and public declarant of intention to be a dictator, has bizarrely won a personally perceived. resounding approval of American voters to be declared President of the United States of America.
The optimistic Founders of our radically conceived, Democratic Republic are at present, according to undisclosed, albeit reliable sources, reportedly in the process of “sitting shiva,” the traditional Hebrew form of mourning, amounting to a period of one week of mutually shared sadness by close relatives immediately following the funeral of a deceased person. If one were conceivably enabled to apprehend the intimately muttered, classical sentiment now pointedly restated by ritually observant founders, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, he would undoubtedly hear the reprised and sage observations: “For a democracy to succeed, one must have a literate and well-informed society” and “It is a Republic if you can keep it,” and would, in our view have the benefit of being reliably informed of the empirical causation of the presenting tragedy.
The intimate whispers of the two contemplative and mournful Founders amounted to a reprise of the historic, relevantly prescient 18th-century concerns of said two Founders. There seems to exist no more cogent understanding of the remarkably disappointing result of the subject election other than the democratically hazardous presence of a large population of inadequately schooled, and poorly informed citizens who perhaps may have valued Trump’s recognizable television identity above his empirically large and shocking panoply of egocentric and pathological lawlessness, bigotry and systemically profound ignorance.
It is our understanding that, as a consequence of such failings, viz., lack of adequate education, and the sorry state of being uninformed of the political issues, that cause the decline in quality of the Nation’s elective judgmental facility.
Before the preparation of this writing, we spent several hours listening to a myriad of news commentators opine on the unexpected result of the election: less-than-expected anti-abortion voters, surprisingly inadequate support of young voters, or women protesting the legal reversal of the right of abortion, disappointing levels of Latino and Black voters, dislike of the costly nature of groceries, less than desirable opposition to Donald Trump’s immoral character, destruction of the difference between fact and fiction, serial mendacity and unhinged declarations to set aside the constitution and rule as a dictator and more creative and esoteric explanations. Notwithstanding the same, we hold firm to the view that the implementing cause resided in the extant populist failure to meet the basic standards expressed by Jefferson and Franklin; and, in comradely spirit, join those two gentlemen and the other optimistic but disappointed Founders, at their compassionate shiva.
It is of existential importance that mainstream Americans do not haplessly amend the high standards and expectations implicit in the Founders’ idealistic and humane standards for their “radical” experiment in Democracy and passively grieve the loss of the election to a denominated “fascist ” and authoritarian tyrant. Citizens of goodwill and moral rectitude should, contrastingly, however, and whenever relevant and possible, positively assert their ardent aspirations for democracy and good government. as intended by our presently mourning Founders.
-p.
plinyblogdotcom 