Let’s make america 1856 again

The GOP wrapped up its 2016 convention this summer. Being a political junkie, a word junkie, and a storyteller, I found the convention lacking in all. Politics, words, and stories. I did, however, find the convention — in particular Donald Trump’s acceptance speech — ripe with theme and meaning. That theme, that meaning? Be afraid, white people. Be very afraid.

Why? (And these are Trump’s thoughts, not mine. I’m channeling.) The country is changing. Hell, it has changed. And a political platform, the plank the candidate runs on during a presidential year, is reflective of two things: the issues that hit that candidate’s minions in the gut, and that candidate’s own psychology. And both reflections spell c-h-a-n-g-e. But the nagging questions remain: (1) Do you recognize the change to begin with? (2) Are you happy with said change? And (3) If you recognize the change and are grossly unhappy with that change, how far are you willing to go to unchange it?

The last of these points used to be serviced by a silly and naïve notion known as “going back to the good old days.” And if you listened to the speakers at the convention, it’s a notion that many Republicans still embrace. The problem is that the GOP party, or at least those who showed up in Cleveland, is so deeply removed from what those “good old days” were, that they might as well exist on a faraway planet, in a galaxy we’ve yet to discover.

Therein lies the problem with the good old days. If you can’t define what they are, then attempting to heal the current mess by embracing them is a zero-sum game. It’s as if somewhere out in the ether, there existed this ideal time and place, inhabited by a man and woman, their 2.5 children, their banal problems, their nonexistential anxieties… and a housekeeper. You see it sometimes when you’re channel surfing and you come across a 57-year-old film or a vapid sitcom in black and white.

Even in my teens, as I watched Ronald Reagan campaign for the presidency, and it was quite clear — coming less than a decade after Vietnam, the countless protests surrounding that war, an environmental movement, the feminist movement — Reagan wanted to take us back to a “happy place.” Just put aside your angst and forget about all the internal turmoil. Bake a pie. Okay, if you don’t want to wear a bra, don’t wear a bra… just don’t make a spectacle of yourself.

And in some odd, ill-definable way, Reagan, after his election — to the happiness of some and the consternation of many — achieved this fiction. We became proud and patriotic, our obsession with deregulated markets and our warthog like obsession with money seemed to smooth things over.

That was 36 years ago. And in those 36 years, something quite profound happened. People on both the right and the left started to realize it was all Jell-O and instant pudding. We were getting screwed. Horrific trade deals that gave us ultra cheap commodities we didn’t need; a savings and loan scandal that decimated the middle class; Desert Storm, a war that George H.W. Bush conjured up to try to make us happy again. (Wars makes us “happy” if they don’t last long and we’re victorious.) That one didn’t work out so well for Poppy Bush.

Moreover, it gave us perhaps the most grueling decade of our existence as a nation: September 11, 2001; another war (the “good one"); still another war (the “debatable one,” which we’re still fighting); and arguably the largest financial meltdown of our banking system in history.

A person who shares a common belief system with thousands of other like-minded paranoid freaks is a political party.

Think of 1980-2016 as a time our nation suffered a deep and dire depression… and then all of sudden it lost its dog. Why did Fluffy have to die? He was such a good boy. And, sure, my life is and has been shit for the last few decades, but why take Fluffy? He never hurt anyone… Fluffy’s metaphoric death was the straw that, over a ten-year period of time, broke the back of the nation’s mental health.

Grief-stricken and desperate, we needed answers and we needed them quickly. And we decided to flip the ancient axiom on its head: The fault, dear Brutus, lay not with ourselves, but with the stars.

We flooded ourselves with otherworldly conspiracy theories: the Birthers, the Truthers, the One-World Government-ers, the people who believe that Hollywood’s spate of alien movies is simply an attempt to prepare us for a one-world government led by space aliens. The list goes on. I personally blame it on the 2007-2008 banking crisis. (Banking, unless you took a course in the history of banking, seemed like the one comfort zone everyone could rely on. Like Grandma’s Bundt cake. But after that disaster, even Grandma didn’t believe in her Bundt cake anymore.)

So where to go for answers? The natural place would have seemingly been back to 1980, when Reagan was elected president and we deluded ourselves into a false sense of hope — a faux happiness, so to speak. We probably knew at the time, those of us around, that we were writing a check we couldn’t cash, but so be it. We’d deal with it when we absolutely had to deal with it.

The problem was that the Reaganite bromides, circa 2015-2016, didn’t do a damn thing to ease our now very apparent existential crisis. So we did what most civilizations do when things begin to turn to shit: We other-ized. This wasn’t our fault. Somebody did this to us.

An individual who paints an entire group with a broad brush is a xenophobe or a racist. However, a person who shares a common belief system with thousands of other like-minded paranoid freaks is a political party (or at least a large part of a political party). Enter the GOP.

Now, I’m a reasonably well-educated man. I can pretty much assure you that trade deals which leave you… fucked… are the responsibility of the party in power and the representatives who negotiate said trade deals. However, I can absolutely assure you that those “got fucked” trade deals are not the responsibility of this country’s 11.5 million undocumented workers. Similarly, the nightmarish terrorist attacks across the world are the responsibility of those (some) who view their faith through a sixth-century lens. It’s not the fault of 150,000 immigrants begging for a chance at some semblance of a normal life in the United States.

Which brings me full-circle to the GOP Convention. Donald Trump is the nominee of the Republican Party. He makes no bones about the futility of harkening back to the Reagan years. People have had enough and are just not going to buy it.

No, Trump wants to take you back further. To a convention where things like “safe spaces,” “date rape,” and “LGBTQ” don’t exist, or if they did, they were hushed up with a hearty switch that was pulled from the branch of an elm tree.
What I gleaned from this convention is that Donald Trump and many (most?) of his supporters don’t want to Make America Great Again.

They want to Make America 1856 again.

PHOTOS: "Immigrants Arriving in new York City, 1887" - iStock/Craig McCausland; "Antique 1867 US Capitol Building Engraving Illustration"; iSTOCK/ideabug