Watching the Debate w/Gustave Flaubert

The best man never wins, or the best woman. You'd think we'd know this by now!

But we're Americans, we keep believing in miracles.

All these folks running for President of the United States of America, who want to be President, who hope to change things, who think they can change things, who have a plan or plans, the ones who won't take money from big money and the ones who will.

So many of them have money to waste, their own and others, while the rest of them seem happy to be wasting other people's.

As I watched the Democratic Presidential Debate last night with Flaubert, a Frenchman, I laid out my platform of American political history for the 1980s onward, so that he, an astute political observer, would have some context for what we were seeing. After watching for a few minutes we both agreed that what we were seeing was a kind of Dancing with the Stars, a grotesque beauty paegeant in which the men could have been wearing Speedos and the women bikinis, judged by CNN and The New York Times.

"Flaubert," I said, "here's the trajectory" and traced for him the following:

--the 1980s. Milton Friedman and the posse of trickle-down economists who were actually creating public policy for a Republican administration led by Ronald Reagan, a man lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time so that he would eventually be referred to as a Great Man--at least great enough to have an airport named after him and to be invoked ad nauseum as the Great Ronald Reagan by future Republican Party Mafia chieftains--while Mikhail Gorbachev is largely forgotten.

--the 1990s. The Birth of Rhodes Scholar Liberalism. Bill Clinton and the cocaine problem on Wall Street, in which the investment banking community seized control of NATO until a man named Newt Gingrich balanced the budget, ging birth to the notion of prudent fiscal conservatisim. Republicans, gaining strength and numbers under the auspices of the Koch Boys and a series of surreptitous think tanks, went on a witchhunt involving Clinton's penis which was proved to be no big deal. Enter Mitch McConnell, first elected in 1984 and re-elected five times since, about whom much more will be said later. 

--the early turn-of-the-century 2000s. The Bush Administration (redux) in cahoots with The Supreme Court, whose Chief Justice apppeared on the cover of Fortune Magazine the week after he was confirmed, wrest the election away from The Democrats. Chaos ensues, particularly in the Mideast where Dick Cheney and friends create a legacy, generation-after-generation hornets nest in Iraq, with an assist from Judith Miller of The New York Times. The tv show Fox and Friends is launched, finding an interested viewer at Trump Tower, 5th Ave. NYC...

--the mid-2000s Obama. Whether or not he was born in the USA Obama is a great speechmaker, and an important symbol of the progress progressives have made since Reconstruction. Those attuned to the subtle but influential semiotics of The Obama Years make note of Barack Obama's use of the term folks when talking to the general populace and when talking about them.

--the late 2000s Trump and the Republican Conquering of the American Mind. Trump, beautiful liar, glorious disrupter, to late American-Empire political life what Rimbaud was to late 19thc European poetry. A singular American leader but in the pantheon of great President's, comparable only to Warren Harding, taking incompetence and disinterestedness to dizzying new heights, and making policy of both...

Flaubert listens intently, smoking a pipe. 

"All I want is one decent human being who is capable, honest, diligent, caring, intelligent, not in thrall to money but aware enough to know the value of an honest wage. Is this too much to ask?" I say to him.

I'd hoped Flaubert says what he's said before, that the whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of idiocy achieved by the bourgeois, but he doesn't say it. He doesn't have to.