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FROM MY CORNER: Hyping the Presidency

Howell Hurst 2020 Presidential Election, American News, Climate & Environment, Corona Virus, Homelessness, Humans, People Politics, Presidential Election, Refugees, War and Organized Mayhem

Both Trump and Biden send me money-begging emails daily.  I’m on Biden’s mailing list because some time in the past I registered as a Democrat. I’m on Trump’s mailing list because I recently subscribed to the conservative Washington Examiner.I changed from Independent to Democrat once to be able to vote in some primary that required it. I subscribed to the Washington Examiner to read this weekly Republican viewpoint and compare it to the Democrats’ liberal slant on things.

Investigating from Left to Right regularly involves watching BBC News, ABC, CNN, NBC, Politico.com, Fox News, and various other alternative online and TV news sources.The oldest known magazines, such as Atlantic, New Yorker, New Republic, Nation, Harper’s, and Mother Jones, are largely liberal. But they do some real in depth investigating and reporting. The New York Review of Books gives us the academicians’ perspective on life.

The ultimate conclusion I reach after some five years or so of reading all the goop printed out there about life on Earth is that the American two party political system is utterly obsolete. Both the Left and the Right are so splintered into multiple fragments, there is no rational common ground of thought holding either of the parties together. All each party has is its personality-based candidate. And, although I prefer Biden, I find both candidates to be more comic figures than legitimate leaders. They are comic when viewed from the opposing viewpoints they represent.

Biden is the old time professional Pol, who long ago hitched his star to the Democrats. Trump is the professional huckster, who long ago hitched his star to his own narcissistic sociopathic ego. I give Biden the edge because he clearly is not an outright egomaniac. He’s just a pretty savvy player in American politics. He’s a good listener to the mood of the country. His feet are on the ever-shifting ground of political evolution.

He’s smart enough to be able to change political direction when getting the vote requires it, pliant enough to get along with lots of people’s viewpoints, and stubborn enough to believe America is worth rescuing from Trump’s egomania. Trump on the other hand is so in love with himself that he is impossible to take seriously. His self-absorbed clownishness is too serious an aberration from any rational norm.

So, here we are: two personality candidates down in the dirt of American politics kicking sand in each other’s faces and calling one another all the names in the book. It’s truly an embarrassing spectacle. But, it does have precedents as long as the life of our country. This Left and Right political free-for-all has been going on since George Washington. Tom Jefferson and Abe Lincoln did it too. However, today’s bickering takes place on a planet engulfed in real physical extremes that literally hold the potential to utterly disrupt the fabric of human social existence.

While Biden and Trump wrestle in the dirt, major phenomenon are gnawing on the threads that constitute the aforesaid human social fabric.: climate change unmanaged; corona virus unchecked; millions of homeless human refugees languishing; millions without jobs or incomes; eternal wars of mass destruction; human trafficking; crude policing; racial strife; public disorder; public looting. And don’t forget all the nuclear bombs.

Neither the American faction of the human race, nor the rest of the world, seems well disposed to sustaining our collective long-term future. We must either hope that it will all work out somehow (a Trumpian view) or grasp at the straw of the soul of our nation being saved (Biden’s pitch.) Neither affords much optimism that they’re onto any kind of comprehensive solution.

The simple matter is that those motivated to run for Political office in the United States and around the world do not seem to possess the intellectual muscle to effectively manipulate the political mechanisms that exist. The problem is probably that those mechanisms themselves are obsolete and incapable of uniting a country, let alone the entire world’s people.

No one talks of actually creating paradigmatic change to make the world work right. Current political movements are nationalist in nature. The issue may likely be actually sustaining planet-wide the human race, or unpleasantly experiencing its far-too-early demise. The natural forces of nature alone are more than we have learned to protect ourselves from. And we have added many human-created problems to the equation.

What I’m discussing here is always only barely simmering on the back burners of our minds and lives while we each nearsightedly grapple with the egos and name-calling of our politicians busy fighting to gain the ear of the media so they can win the votes to be in charge of our existential three-ring circus.

My problem is I don’t truly possess any real conviction that either of the current  two contenders will actually be able to use the mangled mechanisms of our obsolete politics to produce the solutions needed. Those mechanisms don’t appear capable of attracting the minds needed to accomplish the task.

I’m looking for the punch line to this joke. But having a hard time finding it.

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