Truth be told, nowhere seems like a better option than where we all seem to be heading. Then again, truth be told, the truth is overrated. On screen one, the Sunday talking heads spent a half hour talking about Donald Trump, and whether his aversion to truth telling is any different from, say, everybody else's. Okay, seriously?
The only thing that sets most politicians apart from the rest of us mortals is there's a lot more at stake when they lie. Let's face it though, in politics and in real life, "lie" is such a strong word; there are lots of shades of gray. "I did not have sex with that woman!" Only two people and a soiled dress know for sure, and different dictionaries might give us different definitions and different answers, but really, who cares? Except for Hillary, and only years later when the whole "affair" just became another little grenade for Hillary-haters to toss her way.
Mostly, for politicians, winning (or not losing what you've already won) is everything, and it's why they pay lots of money -- no doubt obtained from questionable sources -- to really smart people who know how to spin a good yarn. Most of us know what it's like to get caught with our hand in a cookie jar, and most of us know how nice it would be to have some help with the back pedaling while we're trying to floss the crumbs out of our teeth. It's human nature. In a presidential election year, it's human nature on steroids.
There are two things that set Donald Trump apart not only from the rest of us mortals but from the rest of the folks vying to be, arguably, the most powerful and important person on earth. First, he already believes he is the most powerful and important person on earth, so that's hard to top. Second -- and this is somewhat related to his penchant for delusion that led to reason number one -- he does not care about facts or crumbs in his teeth or back pedaling. Essentially, he has no shame. Look at the man's hair.
Is anyone really surprised that a whole lot of folks want him to be POTUS even though they know, deep down, he lies? Let she who has never chosen to believe her husband's answer when she asks "do these jeans make my ass look fat?" be the one to cast the first stone. People like to hear that we can easily identify all of our enemies and, as a result, easily obliterate them all. There is nothing like a basic formula to make everyone breathe a sigh of relief and sleep better at night. This isn't the first time somebody has stepped up to a soap box claiming to have a simple solution to "the problem" and gotten otherwise right thinking folks to believe him. And it certainly won't be the last.
Mostly, I shake my head in amusement at Donald Trump, but today I watched a bunch of really smart political commentators analyze why saying "your ass doesn't look fat in those jeans" when everyone knows damn well it does is different from trying to explain why your hand was in the cookie jar. And, I was thinking, if that's something that even merits discussion we really are going nowhere fast. All of us.
They say bad things happen in threes, and this morning, as I strode on a stair climber to nowhere while I watched the decline of civilization on two television screens (the second one was airing a piece about the millions of dollars celebrities spend on gifts for themselves and their loved ones, but that's a post for another time), I figured there was nowhere to go but up. Ha!
As if on cue, a fitness instructor who appeared to have a megaphone sewn into his vocal chords started screaming out instructions to the line of people on treadmills behind me. In a room filled with signs reminding us not to talk on our cell phones, where the televisions are silent unless you plug yourself in, where the treadmills talk to you and encourage you and take you on virtual tours of the Alps and pretty much do everything for you except your laundry, seasoned runners with sinewy thighs and no body fat needed someone to scream at them at the top of his lungs for forty-five minutes. "Precision running," the class is called. I am not lying, not this time.
I was going nowhere. Politicians and talking heads were going nowhere. Celebrities were going nowhere. Actually, they were jetting off everywhere, looking for perfect and useless gifts. And now I was going deaf. What a morning, what a world.
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