We live in a post parody world where anything is possible. Any thing. If you had said years ago that you had a vision in your crystal ball that a new leader would come to this country, a complete outsider to politics. And he would be thrice married, six times bankrupt, a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist and defamer of the woman(en) he abused; and he would lead a coup d’etat on the Capitol — yet still get elected to a second term — you would have been locked up. And they would have thrown away the key. So here we are with a vision of what may replace the Star Spangled Banner. Although in reality, this version would have to have a North Korean PR spin to really please His Orangeness.
That’s where we are in the year 2025. And next year America will be celebrating her 250th birthday, with such a clown in office that the Founding Fathers would be aghast if they could see him. Simply aghast.
For you see, many things change in life, but not human nature. The likes of James Madison and John Adams would be amazed at the electric light. Or maybe not so much, because Ben Franklin used to talk about such things, about harnassing electricity. They would marvel at the television set, the motion picture screen, both regular and 3-D.
They would love to fly aloft in the heavens in a jet. These wonders would stun them. So would skyscrapers, the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty. But being men of good character, men who knew the difference between right and wrong, they would not be fooled by Trump. I truly believe that the Founding Fathers would see him for what he is.
And if I was writing that encounter as a science fiction/time travel piece, I think they might just tear up the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and walk out into the woods and forget about democracy and the American experiment. And could you blame them?
250 years of being a republic, surviving numerous wars, all manner of bloodshed, and then it comes down to a heavily made up, hairsprayed clown doing photo ops in the Oval Office, between golfing vacations? As the Turks observed, “When you send a clown to the palace, he does not become a king. The palace becomes a circus.”
We have lived to see the wisdom in those words.
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