I Like Ike

This is a mental health newsletter and the current presidential election campaign is making me sick

Gnawbone is a mental health newsletter, yet I’m writing about our presidential politics today. Why?

Because the politics are

a)     Driving me crazy

b)    Trump and Biden are crazy

c)     We’re all about to go crazy if either man wins

Folks, this is a low point in modern American democracy, and I feel compelled to share with you my current vexations. You’ve seen the recent polling: Most Americans do not think the candidate of either party is in any way competent to serve as president going forward. They do not want a repeat of the 2020 election, yet no credible alternative has emerged to challenge either of the presumptive nominees.

We no longer have transparency in government, of course, so we really don’t know what either man is up to. It’s like ordering off a menu in a restaurant but the meals you get have little or nothing to do with what you’ve ordered, then you’re told with a straight face, ‘But that’s what you wanted!’ That’s what has happened to our politics.

Trump tried to steal the election in 2020, and Mike Pence, and others, wouldn’t let him do it. I don’t know if the goons who invaded Congress on “January 6” were true insurrectionists, but Trump certainly was planning a coup (while getting other people to do his dirty work, as usual). Trump is so clearly a sorehead, easily offended and insecure, and, like the moguls and mafia bums he must have known in New York, he’s all about getting even.

Biden ran on a platform where he said he’d ‘bring the country together’ again, yet he’s done just the opposite, opening the borders even more, directly insulting Trump supporters (which can only guarantee their blowback), and claiming he’s “created” more jobs than any president in history when, in fact, most of those hires simply were people going back to jobs where there had been layoffs during Covid. I can’t help but think he’s a megalomaniac like Trump. He must think it is he, not Lincoln, who should get credit for freeing the slaves, who is the personification of the Statute of Liberty because of his immigration policies, who is George Washington incarnate, the “father of our country,” i.e., another megalomaniac. (See, this is a mental health column.)

Both men have revealed their hand – they cannot stand not being president. They were born to be president! Only they can save the country! It’s not just ambition or a personality disorder – this is a psychosis because they seem to firmly believe they are something that they absolutely are not. It doesn’t help us, or them, that countless supporters and people in the media, on both the Left and the Right, are constantly proclaiming, directly or indirectly, that either man really is the only man who can save country – it’s like the forces of Good versus the Forces of Evil, nothing but a master narrative construct that is a derivate of the first religion, namely Zoroastrianism, which emphasized the battle of Good vs. Evil throughout history that will result in the triumph of the Good or, in this scenario, either the election of Trump or Biden. Well, believing in things that patently are untrue is a psychosis, and that’s what scares me about both Trump and Biden. It’s not just a campaign, but world history that’s at stake for them, the battle of Good vs. Evil.

You probably have gotten the message that I’m pretty upset with the current trend in American politics. Anxious, even, yet another mental health issue. Well, let me tell you about the last presidential election that was fair, important, and honorable, a time when you could largely trust that the leaders wanted to solve problems and make America better a better place for people, and that their platforms really were what they believed in, not just bait to entice this or that constituency or segment of the population.

It’s Gen. Dwight David (Ike) Eisenhower vs. Gov. Adlai Stevenson in both 1952 and 1956. I’m old enough to remember both campaigns, my earliest memory being in my Auntie’s home in Memphis when the vice-presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket, Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, came on the little Black and White television screen and all my older relatives in the crowded living room where we watched the convention called his name and jumped for joy as if they were in the convention hall themselves. But the greater point is that the top of the ticket for both parties were two dedicated, hard-working and “true” people, and they came of age where your campaign was based on what you really believed in, not what your handlers and political consultants told you to say.

I won’t go into biographies of Eisenhower or Stevenson here – you can find short bios online easily enough – but Gov. Stevenson (Illinois) served in the Navy near the end of World War 1 and Eisenhower was Allied Commander during World War II, which you probably do know. Stevenson was an authentic Progressive (well before the current version that identifies specific underserved, oppressed or marginalized communities and promises each of them the moon), while Eisenhower, who also was President of Columbia University for a time, was a moderate Republican who followed court orders to integrate public schools in the 1950s, i.e., he did not think he was above the law.

Neither man was perfect, but neither could have been in my nightmare scenario for the future of America – that’s a Trump vs. Biden rematch.