National Politics as Breakfast Cereal

I had thought that I would use a photograph of new improved Cocoa Puffs to head this post, but I found Lucky Trumps, which is even better.

For years, I didn't vote in the presidential elections.  The candidates were usually twiddle-dee and twiddle-dum, and I didn't want to recognize their legitimacy by choosing one.  The last time I supported a major candidate was 1964, having been told by all of my liberal teachers that Goldwater would start a war.  Then Mr. Kennedy brought us to the brink with Cuba. Each president seemed like a bowl of breakfast cereal, each claiming to be new and improved, what Jordan Peterson called, if I remember correctly, normal incompetency.  I would prefer a president who took seriously the job as described in the constitution rather than trying to convince us that his Great New Plan will solve all the problems of the universe, including failed marriages and crabgrass.  It was always obvious that none of their Great New Plans would do anything except cost a lot of money and usually make a lot of problems worse.  I can't help but be amused and saddened that although the democrats under Lyndon Johnson told us that they would solve all the problems of race and poverty with a series of very expensive programs that included a Head Start program to feed kids, snatched from their families, with hearty breakfasts of Cocoa Puffs, the democrats are now telling us that they need to spend more money doing more of the same.

I considered voting for McCain in 2008, but he had a full bozo zonkers VP running mate.  There's nothing more vacuous than hope.  Mr. Obomber was a wonderful poser, publicly pondering wisely what options he might have before dropping the bombs that less hopeful presidents would have fired off immediately.  I don't think any other  Nobel Peace Prize Laureate has bombed so many people.

Then came the 2016 circus, with candidates from both parties who were far below the level of ordinary incompetence to which I had become accustomed.  I voted for Gary Johnson.

Now, 'liberal friends', please don't stop reading because of what I am going to say next.  I have been pleasantly surprised that the Trump presidency has been less of a disaster than I had feared.  Don't worry.  I still think that he's a fucking moron, but some of his [administration's] policies have been pretty good.  (Some of them were probably the work of Paul Ryan, who had the good sense to get out of Dodge before the big showdown at noon.). He remains an egomaniacal nitwit, but most of his 'policies' are bluster and show.  Yes, the nation is very divided, but the divisions within the nation are encouraged by both sides who don't seem to want to allow for any real diversity but to impose an intellectual unity that I find scary as hell.  

The worst part of the Trump regime, IMHO, is that he has destroyed much of US influence in any world wider than his Twitter followers.  He never understood that NATO was a cornerstone of a real 'America First' policy, nor that our economic engagement with China, which made China dependent on the US to continue to fuel their manufacturing growth producing the physical models of US ideas, was a strong ring in the nose of the Chinese water buffalo.  I suspect that had Trump not insisted on making China the enemy, Hong Kong might not have become more fodder for the buffalo.

And now we're in the midst of the vacuous promises wars of Great New Plans again, and Joe Biden seems as demented as Trump ever has.  One might wish--hell, I do wish--that if Biden were elected, he would try to make the US the strong force in the world again, not because I think the United States is some perfect place--I'm no utopian--but because the Pax American has for all of its bumbling, still kept wars at a lower-than-usual level and, most importantly, it has been central to the sort of global economic growth that has been ending poverty for more people than at any other time in history.

But, enter the Diabolus ex Machina:  the virus.

Trump is stumbling and blustering, belaboring decisions much longer than Obama ever did, but without the posture of careful thought.  If Biden has any intentions of trying to return the United States to position of trust-worthiness and influence beyond Coney Island and Disney Land, he ain't talking about it as he tells us that he will make us well and rich again, even if the inflation from  the Great New Plan would mean that probably my first purchase with my next hand-out will be a wheelbarrow.

Because, here's the problem:  eating the all-new breakfast cereal will not really make us strong and healthy.  Cocoa Puffs are full of hot air, with a lot of sugar to make them go down easy.  The United States needs, even if we don't deserve, considering our recent actions, a full English breakfast.  We need Locke and Hobbes, if we are to avoid collapsing into chaos.  And the world needs all the help it can get from the United States, not in foreign aid, but in global engagement.

Full disclosure:  I don't expect the United States to survive very long.  We have entered, as many science fiction writers have suggested, a post-national age.  I think the history of how humans have organized themselves suggests the same thing.  We have evolved larger and larger units of organizations, of 'usness', as we have come into contact with more and more people beyond our little families.  But the understanding of a larger unity than our tribe, whether it's a family or an ethnicity or a race or a religion or a choice of breakfast cereal or smart phone brand, has, as McLuhan warned us it would, been eroded by a growing neo-tribalism.  The present pandemic may result not only in a lot of deaths but in a lot of retreats into intellectual as well as physical isolations.

So:  am I foolish to hope that we might get over the delusion that all we need to have strong bodies [and minds] eight ways is to eat the right breakfast cereal, to hope that we might even lift, bro, and do the hard work to try to understand the maelstrom of the 21st. century?

Alas.  I probably am.  But, I am old, and there's no fool like an old fool, especially one who remembers when he wanted his mother to buy him Frosted Flakes for breakfast rather than oat meal, because Frosted Flakes had 'free' prizes in every box.