The Healing Power of Ridicule
Why you should laugh at Trump through your salty tears
I try never to be overly optimistic. Why set yourself up for disappointment? For I’ve lived in this world long enough to sometimes feel about it how the blues singer Tampa Red felt about his baby, or his big-legged woman, or whatever the appropriate term of endearment is for his lady friend: You’s a mean mistreatin’ mama/And you don’t mean me no good. That said, here’s the good news, first: everything ends, eventually. As will happen with the sequel that so many of us never wanted to see: Revenge Of Trump 2, Electric Boogaloo: This Time It’s Personal (But Then, When Hasn’t It Been?). An unwieldy title, to be sure. But Trump’s always been a garrulous fella, particularly when discussing his favorite subject — himself. As the late Kinky Friedman put it in a moment of self-deprecation (a rhetorical gift that Trump was never bestowed): “I’m not afraid of anything, just that I may have to stop talking about myself for five minutes.”
See that? We’re only one day into Trump 2.0, and I’m only one paragraph and four subject-changes into this piece, yet since he seems to occupy so much national disc space, I’ve already adopted his verbal tics, babbling like a brook running though Mr. Trump’s Bedminster Golf Club. One of the top properties in the world, he wouldn’t mind telling you if he were the bragging type. Though Mr. Trump and I don’t call it “babbling.” We call it “The Weave.” In any case, that brings us to the bad news. Which is that before Trump’s term ends in 1,459 days, 7 hours, and 17 minutes (but who’s counting) — assuming that it ends, since Trump and his cohorts now seem to regard the Constitution as a suggestion more than a binding document — a lot of other things could end in the meantime. Like respect for Rule of Law, decency, honesty, morality, being a democratic republic instead of an autocratic what-the-f-k-is-it — you know, the small stuff.