I never thought that mental illness was a contagious disease, but I’ve come to fear that the patently insane Chief Executive of this here country has passed on a significant case of mental and emotional discombobulation to my own self, and, perhaps, many others as well. Examining a short spew from the Google pipe clearly shows that much of what I am experiencing since election day 2020 supports a possible diagnosis of depression, if not post-traumatic stress. Or maybe it’s all just appropriate responses to the political horror that threatens my erstwhile beloved homeland at the hand of the current occupant at 1600 PA, his henchmen, enablers and minions. Surely it’s not illness to be saddened by great sadness. But everyone around me seems to be coping at least somewhat better than I am. So, there’s that.
My mental disintegration, manifested in myriad small ways too boring to review here, springs from fears of Donald John Trump refusing to vacate his office when the time comes in less than 3 weeks. A tiny number of public voices, like Bill Maher, attempted to start a serious conversation, long before the election, about such an exigency, but, unsurprisingly, people have trouble taking seriously ideas received from comedians.
Bill Maher’s speculations about how Trump would behave if he lost the 2020 election surfaced just 16 months into the Trump Presidency. I’m a sometime viewer of his HBO show, though not a real fan, because his iconoclastic posing too often makes him unwatchable. Still, I noticed early on that, for example, he asked every one of the several Presidential candidates whom he interviewed on his show what they would do if they won the election and Trump refused to let go of the office when the time came. None of them ventured reassuring answers about the availability and efficacy of means to effectively deal with such a contingency. Even since the election, the Biden team’s efforts to address this issue rely, in the end, on the assumption that legal norms will somehow ultimately prevail.
Nothing is really known or knowable about how Donald John Trump will behave as the last hours of his term tick away in the next few weeks. But current events have only served to increase, rather than calm my fears about the subject. The number of Congressional and Senate Republicans openly supporting the President’s delusional claims of election illegality grows, even though nothing but political calculation supports such a trend. Reports of Trump loyalists sabotaging transition team work and of possibly malignant Trump loyalists in the secret service only add to worry that a peaceful transfer of Presidential power does not lie ahead of us.
So, yeah, I’m living under a pall of terror that my country, that I was taught to love and served under arms in time of war, has set foot on a slippery slope toward civil war and dissolution into lawlessness. This is particularly difficult for a person of my age and experience. I’m a septuagenarian, retired attorney with decades of experience in trial and appellate courtrooms all over America. My working life was dedicated to and premised on respect for the Rule of Law, the idea that the law is a real thing, capable of determination, explication and principled application. Without this foundation, my sense of place in the World dissolves and I lose much of my emotional frame of reference.
It’s getting worse by the day. On today’s Front Page, two of the contributors in the first ten posts, as of this writing, used the word “coup” in their titles and a third used “overturn election”. I’m a frightened old man saddened to the point of despondency as the world around him dissolves.
Is there a pill for that?
/rant