It's democracy, folks, learn to love it

The Column: 03.04.24

If a person lives in a democracy, which thus far we do, you soon learn that politics is not an orderly business like cosmetic dentistry or carpentry, it is more like pond hockey or maybe a conclave of sociopaths or an ostrich jubilee, and the messiness can drive you crazy, like finding potatoes in your sock drawer and rutabagas in the medicine cabinet, and the alternative to despair is amusement.

So when the Alabama Supreme Court decides that an embryo is a human being and you see Republicans scrambling to distance themselves from this lest they alienate young people of voting age who were conceived in vitro, you wonder if someday sperm will be given the same protection and male masturbation will be considered child abuse.

There is no normal anymore. The Orange One is in hock for a half-billion on two court decisions and the court requires him to put the money on the table pronto but he may not have ready cash. Banks and bond companies might well blanch at giving a hand to a guy with so many bankruptcies but maybe Xi Jinping would cut him a check and save his butt. Would the Republican Party be okay with that? It’d be something new in the history of the republic, but hey, change is inevitable, no?

I’m only thinking ahead here, trying to see where we’re going. Maybe a monarchy. We already have Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Let them have the White House and Speaker Mike Johnson can be prime minister and live in a little townhouse at No. 10 K Street and when he has something to say, he can step out the front door and stand on the sidewalk and speak his piece. Decapitate the presidency by putting a crown on it. The Senate becomes the House of Bores where you plant elderly people and let them natter and harrumph all they like while the P.M. goes about the business of governing.

Number 45, Mr. Sunkist, proved one thing about the presidency: you can have a raving maniac narcissist whose knowledge of policy foreign or domestic is less than that of a bright tenth-grader, and he can bluster and wave his arms — and it’s embarrassing and it makes our allies nervous but it doesn’t really do much damage other than weaponize the Supreme Court.

Teach Harry about baseball, tell him and Meghan to button their lips, tell the press to leave them alone, and we’re all set.

Then we can deal with real problems honestly. Republicans make an issue of the southern border: okay, fine. Deal with it. Those migrants don’t head for the Rio Grande so they can enjoy Netflix. They are motivated by sheer despair. The Rio Grande is a shallow river you can wade across. If my parents had faced brutality and starvation in Minnesota in 1955, we would’ve headed straightaway for the Canadian border and learned to talk Canadian.

The truth is that there’s plenty of work for undocumented persons, the dirty work that our young people avoid so they can be singer-songwriters. The country is inundated by miserable music streaming on a thousand platforms, earning pocket change for the songwriters and gradually depressing the mean IQ of Generations X and Z, meanwhile someone needs to slaughter and butcher the turkeys, which involves repetitive work with sharp objects and actual skill. Immigrant work.

If Sunkist is convicted of insurrection, I suggest we deport him to Slovenia and see how he likes it. They must have a used castle he can buy. He can call it Trump Tower (Trump Stolp). His great line, “There has never been anything like this great movement of ours, nothing in the history of the world” translates as “Česa podobnega temu našemu velikemu gibanju še ni bilo, nikoli v zgodovini sveta.” He can tell it to his Slovenian gastroenterologist when he goes in to be treated for diarrhea.

Every morning 17 newspaper columnists tell you to dread the future — authoritarianism, an economic disaster, the collapse of Social Security and Medicare, climate change — and I don’t disagree that there’s work to be done, so go do your part, but you need to enjoy the ridiculousness too. Mr. Johnson, a Republican nerd from Shreveport whom nobody knew months ago is now walking a tightrope knowing that three Republican idiots can dump him in the drink. Our country looks to a deer in the headlights for leadership. Cut yourself a slice of chocolate cake, put three scoops of vanilla on it, tune in tomorrow.

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