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I told myself that if I were going to go wire-to-wire with the Democratic National Convention, I would force myself to watch most or all of the Republican National Convention. Except for one thing: I didn’t realize how powerful the gag reflex was.
Beginning on night one, I learned that far-left-leaning Joe Biden was going to take away my health care, open the borders to roaming groups of rapists, and make the suburbs uninhabitable. This of course was followed by descriptions of Donald J. Trump as a man of compassion, intellect, and high moral values.
For fear of puking on the couch, I quickly reneged on my promise, hoping that I could tolerate the RNC in small bites via CNN the next day—although I admit that even a few moments of listening to Kimberly Guilfoyle’s high-decibel ranting was enough to cause severe rumbling in my gastrointestinal tract. Who, other than her mother, could love such a person? Oh, I see, Donald Trump Jr. Makes sense… a perfect pair.
Beyond being reviled by the specifics of their messages, this really did make me take a step back and reflect on how the same events could be seen and analyzed through very different lenses, how things could be interpreted, yea distorted, when described by different people with different values and motives.
This became crystal clear as I watched Mike Pence, a man as deeply religious as he is hypocritical, talking about the recent tragic events in Wisconsin. As he referred to the tragedy of the violence there, I was caught in disbelief for a moment. Could it be that he actually recognized that the shooting of Jacob Blake was another instance of the sad, violence-filled state of race relations in America? Then it became apparent. He didn’t give a damn about the shooting of yet another man of color. The violence he was set on stopping was that of the protestors. Bring on the National Guard. Get out the tear gas. Shelve those rubber bullets and get me the real thing.
So will I be at the TV tonight when they roll out the Trumpster, backed by the Stars and Stripes, and with patriotic music blaring? On the one hand, I won’t be hearing anything new. It will be the same vile stuff from the same vile man. “I am great. I take credit for everything and anything you like, and I am equally blameless for everything you don’t. The Chinese flu—not me. The stinking and sinking economy—not me. The racial and ethnic divide in this country—why would you ever think I had anything to do with that.”
His speech writers will fill the teleprompter with one after another distortion and lie, and he will praise himself and maliciously demonize anyone who disagrees with him. But I might feel that I cannot avoid watching this spectacle, in the same shameful way that it’s hard to avert one’s eyes in the presence of a terrible accident.
I probably won’t make it from beginning to end. But I do know that I’ll have my air sickness bag at my side. I’m likely to need it.
a man as deeply religious as he is hypocritical good line, Ed
game on, now. . . game on.