shithole

Recently, a memory of my son as a small boy came back to me. He was, in those days, terrified of clowns. Something about their strange, mask-like, painted faces unnerved him utterly, chilled him to the bone. To the rest of us, they were comic, but to him -- or so I came to imagine anyway -- they were emanations from hell.

Those circus memories of long ago seem relevant to me today because, in November 2016, the American electorate, or a near majority of them anyway, chose to send in the clowns. They voted willingly, knowingly, for the man with that strange orange thing on his head, the result -- we now know, thanks to his daughter -- of voluntary "scalp reduction surgery." They voted for the man with the eerily red face, an unearthly shade seldom seen since the perfection of Technicolor. They voted for the overweight man who reputedly ate little but Big Macs (for fear of being poisoned), while swinging one-handed from a political trapeze with fingers of a particularly contestable size. They voted for the man who never came across a superlative he couldn't apply to himself. Of his first presidential moment, he claimed "the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe"; he declared himself "the greatest jobs president that God ever created"; he swore to reporters that he was "the least racist person you have ever interviewed"; he offered his version of modesty by insisting that, "with the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that's ever held this office"; and when his mental state was challenged, he responded that his "two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart," adding, "I think that [I] would qualify as not smart, but genius... and a very stable genius at that!"