Electile Dysfunction

Little Marco, lying Ted. Tumescent Donald. Dear John.

These guys do a better send up of themselves than SNL could ever hope to do. The nightmare continues: images of the White House dwarfed by an oversized TRUMP marquis,  images of outsized Trump components that I try desperately to unsee. Without needing to boast, Canada is more alluring and intoxicating than Donald's energetic man parts could ever be. Even if he promised not to talk.

As I prepared for my trip to New York City this weekend, somebody asked me to sniff around, see if it's as Hillary-loving there as people think. What I discovered is this: I don't know. Word has it lots of folks still feel the "Bern" here, but nobody in my small cadre of revelers really talked about it. In fact, super Saturday passed before I even remembered it was Super Saturday, and I woke this morning with a pleasant hangover that had nothing to do with a buffoonish political debate.

Growing up in New York, I always assumed the rest of the country was just like us. It was a rude awakening, when my Greyhound busload of like-minded and like-raised teenagers pulled up to a luncheonette somewhere west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies and the locals sitting on a bench outside looked as if they had just spotted a UFO. New Jersey, they whispered. Not New York. New Jersey. They couldn't go that extra step, couldn't wrap their minds around the real alien truth.

Wandering through Central Park on a crisp and sunny March afternoon, I fell in love again, as I always do, with New York. The colorful mosaic of people on the move, all at their own pace, always some small group paused along the sidelines for a chat or a photograph or just to take it all in. Performance art. In the heart of New York, a place that can seem alien and daunting and even distasteful to the uninitiated, I don't remember hearing a harsh word or witnessing anything rude, for an entire weekend.

Could this be just a tiny oasis in a country gone mad? Or was I simply too engrossed in personal contentment, thrilled to be among family and friends celebrating a much needed happy occasion in a year that has already begged for a do-over in so many ways. In the span of less than three months, I've been devastated by personal loss and, though it matters far less in the grand scheme of things,  disheartened by the spectacle of American politics. My suspicion of politicians in general has turned into disgust, and I cannot help but wonder how this happened. Certainly, nobody in my little world gets it. My world, obviously as small as the world of the folks sitting on a bench somewhere between the Mississippi and the Rockies, as alien to me, maybe, as I was to them when I stepped off the Greyhound spaceship. I'd like to think we have all gotten better since the summer of 1975, when we didn't have social media bringing us together, that there's a clearer definition of good and evil that has nothing to do with race or religion or geography. But all I know is there are a whole lot of people out there, somewhere, who are buying into something that is at best comical, and at worst frightening, at least to me and the people I hang with, and I just don't get it.

Good things, like bad things, should happen in threes, and by my count, we still have some wiggle room on the good side. Maybe little Marco or lying Ted or tumescent Donald or poor, dear John will do something surprising, or rational, or good. I suppose there's always Canada, eh?