Democracy: a Weather Event

It’s rained a great deal recently. Having forgotten what rain looks and sounds like, I’ve spent the last several days, either staring at the ceiling or on my hands and knees looking for leaks in the house, suspecting the worst while also trusting that the worst is always yet to come. 

Everybody’s talking about the weather again, it’s the number one topic of conversation ; the weather comes first now, and democracy second. All this hand-wringing over democracy seems a bit pointless to me. The problem with democracy seems so obvious—that it depends upon people who constantly crave both our attention and our approval. This malady leads of course to all the maladjusted, half-baked, medium-rare sociopaths who have sought public office in the last 25 years, both those suffering from severe psychic dislocations (B. Clinton, D. Trump), those with less severe but still identifiable symptoms (Pelosi, McConnell), and those who don’t even pretend to any semblance of mental health (this list is quite long, and growing exponentially.) These are not well people; these are people who are able to sit through long, boring committee meetings and hours of testimony from yet another creepy candidate for The Supreme Court, mostly at the service of their personal neurosis and for the possible opportunity of being interviewed on the nightly news or NPR, or scoring an invite to play golf with Lindsey Graham.

It could be worse: we could have no democracy at all and climate change, or democracy and a great deal of aberrant weather in terms of wind and rain, snow and tornados, drought and floods, famines, food-stamps and migrant camps, and a record-high Pentagon budget to help keep everyone safe from democracy.