CSotD: Dark Days and Cold Nights
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David Horsey lays out the mood of the season for, as he notes in his essay, not simply the majority of voters who opposed Trump, but also for a fair number of Republicans who are not going along with the Trump pogram, and you can check back in a year or so to see if I spelled that right.
Horsey notes that there have been plenty of times when a conservative victory disappointed progressives, but never to this extent or for this long after the election. Then again, he says, the stakes have never been so high.
No one — certainly no Republican — contemplated such a scenario when Reagan was elected, or when George H.W. Bush or his son took office. Nobody thought a victory by Sen. John McCain in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012 would have threatened democracy. This time that concern is widespread and far from irrational, given Trump’s words, actions and erratic, bullying temperament.
Horsey quotes David Frum as an example of a one-time rightwinger currently in despair over the Trump ascendancy, and that is a name that will reverberate more with readers north of the border, since Frum is the son of a deeply respected CBC news anchor and first unveiled his extreme conservative rhetorical skills during Meech Lake.
However, you can add to that list one-time bomb-thrower Glenn Beck, a far better-known name in the US, who reversed fields and came out against Trump before the election.
Beck's rebirth as someone with a conscience makes me think you could write the next chapter of "A Christmas Carol" in which Ebenezer Scrooge finds that he's pissed off so many people that he is unforgiven and his change of heart has done nothing, because Beck has not exactly been welcomed home by his former opponents.
I guess that wouldn't matter if it were not part of a self-defeating pattern.
There are far too many continuing rants about the Electoral College, which apparently, judging from the shock and awe, nobody knew about until Nov 9.
It's like a football team complaining after the game that they hadn't been told about touchdowns counting more than field goals.
Horsey cites the coming debacle, noting that it will be "aided and abetted by a compliant Republican Congress," and that, in my opinion, is where the effort should be directed.
Not to say that Democrats shouldn't reflect hard upon the wisdom of tamping down Bernie Sanders instead of absorbing his platform, and of engineering the nomination of a person whom the Republicans had already campaigned against for three decades.
But there is a point at which staring in the rearview mirror simply leads to more accidents.
Not, however, to suggest that anyone should brush aside well-considered despair, and, over at Fusion, Cory Thomas describes his response in a cartoon (of which this is but a sample) that is calm but does not lack passion.
It reminds me of the aftermath of the King assassination, a time of which decent white Americans have said they wanted to just go up to random African-Americans on the street and apologize, and I have to honestly admit I don't remember conversations about it with my black friends in college. I'm sure they knew how I must have felt, but I don't think we talked about it.
But that was an event that could not be undone. This is different. This we have to talk about.
We can't just wait for the wounds to heal, and by "we" I mean all of us, not just the "we" that usually means "we in the ethnic/racial majority."
But especially that we.
Bill Sanders suggests holding Congress responsible, albeit by depicting the brick wall against which Elijah Cummings is throwing himself.
Still, pressuring Senators and Representatives to act responsibly — and campaigning for change in 2018 — has got to be more effective than hiding in foxholes and waiting for the president to suddenly become a different person.
Meanwhile, Chan Lowe does perhaps the best job I've seen of adapting a Christmas standard to the situation we are facing, and that "we" includes people who wear headgear but also the "we" who do not.
The universal "we" that we pretend to embrace this time of year.
Two responses to all this despair:
The Kings Features Archivist has a selection of full-page Sunday funnies from Christmas, 1923 to cheer things up.
As said before, the comics are posted there in a format that lets you blow them up and read them quite readily, so I'm not even going to try to replicate anything here.
However, I'll poke around and do something similar in a few days, so go read those and then stay tuned here.
And Alex manages to pull a grim chuckle out of a grim Christmas, which I feature here not only because it made me both laff and wince, but because it provides an excuse for me to direct you to my own thoughts about lousy holidays, which I post each year for the benefit of those in similar straits.
If you don't need it yourself, perhaps you know someone who does.
Because it should never, ever get to this point.
Now here's our moment of blue zen
To prove that nothing is so blue that it can't raise a smile, this song always reminds me not just of Christmas but of interviewing Flora MacDonald a few days after the nearly-70-year-old had caught a skate on a crack in the ice on the Rideau Canal while speed-skating on her lunch hour. She had broken her nose and was asking that her full-raccoon face not be photographed. She was, however, a smart, fun, delightful person, a great interview and one of Canada's best presents ever to itself.
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