Images

One year down and three(?) to go and we’re already exhausted with this idiot. But what more is there left to say about him? Yes, he’s a vulgar, cynical narcissist who thinks he’s the second coming of sliced bread. Yes, he’s an empty bag of self-help cliches merged with the classic con man’s instinct for the best way to sell snake oil to rubes. But he’s just the brute symbol of a national malaise that has all but destroyed this once hopeful experiment in democracy. The two party system is dead and the electoral college, instead of preventing the mob from electing a demagogue, has become the prime tool for gaming the system. Maybe democracy only works in small settings and simply implodes when stretched too far. After all, the Greek polis was a handful of wealthy educated citizens, the rest being slaves.

What a puzzle we Homo sapiens are: a surgeon will labor for hours to save the life of one person; rescuers will risk their own lives searching for someone trapped in the rubble who may already be dead. Then a 64 year old with no criminal record, wakes up one day and decides that he now exists in a video game like Grand Theft Auto and wants to earn the most wanted stars by murdering the most people in one session; a young German airlines pilot who erroneously thinks his eyesight is failing and is depressed by the thought of losing his license, decides to commit suicide by flying a plane filled with people who have done him no harm into the side of a mountain. The heart of human evil is not racism or even our love of gratuitous violence and war, but a psychopathic narcissism that is the dark heart of our endless search for individual freedom. Elvis Costello had it right about us: “It’s been the same since the world began when a vicious creature made the leap from monkey to man.