The Stoned-16-Year-Old Presidency.
I’ve been having the strangest sense of deja vu during this year of the Trump Presidency.
I can’t explain it. I wasn’t around for the rise of fascism in Europe. I vaguely remember Nixon, but you have to wonder if anyone at the time really understood how thoroughly he was betraying us.
Then it hit me. What‘s been coming back to me. I was a kid, somewhere in middle school. One of the usual bunch I hung out with had an older sister. Her boyfriend fascinated us. He had his driver’s license. We thought he was stoned most of the time, although we were too young and innocent to know for sure what that even meant. He acted crazy and that was enough for us.
One summer afternoon we were hanging around the driveway and he volunteered to take us for a ride. He said we’d go 100 miles per hour.
This was a bad idea and I knew it. I’m pretty sure none of us really thought his old car would go that fast. We piled into his ancient Oldsmobile. Bench seats. No seat belts.
He hit 100 on the Crosstown, and it was a terrifying sort of fun. We wove through the traffic. The car swayed wildly on its springs, making big arcs toward the ditch in the center before veering back toward the far right edge of the highway.
The crazy got even more disturbing when he rocketed up the exit ramp and into the neighborhoods. He played a mad game at each corner, calling out for our next direction at the last possible moment then cranking the wheel hard left or right without giving up an ounce of momentum. The car lurched sideways and the back end broke loose. The tires smoked and threw little chunks of rubber up onto the lawns.
We all wanted out but no one was brave enough to admit it. Once you realize you’ve abandoned all hope to the fates there is nothing left to do but hang on and grin stupidly. It’s the same look you see on the faces of the big groups surrounding the president each time he stages his vainglorious photo ops for yet another executive order signing.
So that’s where the deja vu has been coming from. The governing model for the entire country is basically a stoned sixteen-year-old going 100 miles per hour in an Oldsmobile with a broken suspension.
The wildest ride of my youth finally ended where it began, with the Oldsmobile rocking to a halt in the driveway and the whole bunch of us tumbling off the bench seat. My only thought, well that was stupid and I’m glad I survived it. For the past year Americans have had to live with the same thought every morning as we take a hard swallow of coffee and try to digest the latest news out of Donald Trump’s Washington.
