Monkey Business

 “The body is strong, but the world always ends up crushing it.” Aleksandar Hemon

Wildfires in Canada. Floods in Vermont and Pennsylvania. Killer heat across the American southwest. Donald Trump. A summer of threats that residents of the open air asylum that is America will do their best to ignore. America is still a powerful nation, but we’re not a serious one. 

In 1987, Senator Gary Hart was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination when he took an ill-fated boat trip out of Miami with a young woman, not his wife. When the press questioned Hart his initial reaction was to deny the allegation, but there were photographs, and the shamed candidate withdrew from the race to repair his marriage. A few months later Hart attempted to restart his bid for the nomination, but the damage to his reputation was done. The Democrats ran Michael Dukakis against Pappy Bush and lost. 

How far we’ve traveled on the road to normalized corruption. Shame no longer has any influence over powerful people. Look at Trump. He has paid no cost for bragging about grabbing women by their vaginas, for paying hush money to a porn actress, for shaking down the president of Ukraine, for stealing classified information and withholding it from the government for more than a year, for being impeached twice, and for instigating an attempted coup. People have forgotten that Trump’s incompetence caused thousands of unnecessary fatalities during the early days of the Covid pandemic. 

Like a landfill, our collective memory hole is running out of capacity. 

In a normal country, Donald Trump wouldn’t be a candidate for president because people with a functioning moral compass wouldn’t allow it. In a normal country, Trump would be shunned, ignored; his name and image would be synonymous with failure and corruption; if he had the temerity to appear in public he would be jeered and mocked, laughed at, ridiculed. His fact-free word salad speeches would draw boos, not cheers. 

The orange-hued Dragon of Lies cannot be shamed. That’s Trump’s super power. It’s also what makes him a sociopath. 

Who turned the world upside down?

A summer of threats. A summer of dancing and baseball and hot dog eating contests in the courtyard of the open air asylum. Don’t worry inmates, we can consume our way out of any difficulty. Eat, drink, be merry, and pay no attention to the choking smoke, withering heat and rising floodwaters. Don’t worry, be happy. All we need is make-believe and Amazon Prime. 

The boat that left Miami with Gary Hart and the woman not his wife on board was called the Monkey Business. Those were more innocent times. If Donald Trump took a cruise tomorrow with an underage Ivanka look-alike, the corporate media would yawn.

No shame. No honor. No decency.