Cliffhanger

As we lurch from crisis to crisis, revelation to revelation, grotesqueness to grotesqueness, I have been wondering what to make of it all. I just haven’t been able to step back far enough to see the big picture.

Who do I blame for enabling it all to happen? Who is waiting to bring truth and justice to our body politic, and to the leaders of our Justice Department?

Who, in short, is the responsible adult in the town of Washington, D.C.

Then - to give credit where credit is due - my 96 year old mother made sense of it all. All she had to do was toss off an off-handed comment as she was walking out of the kitchen. “It’s just like a movie,” she said.

She was right. Everything that has been happening in Washington for the past year or so - absent the human tragedy being caused to a lot of people, some of whom ironically voted for Donald Trump - has been a grade B cliffhanger, an old movie with lots of action, little substance, car crashes, explosions, trains running off bridges and volcanos erupting. And, the reel ends the same way every time. Every week.

The heroine is in danger. The hero is racing to save her. The villain is bringing his crafty plan to its climax. and then the lights go up. Tune in next week. The movie just goes on and on and on.

                                               What's Playing This Week?

North Korea has missiles, nuclear ones. The world is at the brink of war. Trump meets with the Dear Leader. Peace is achieved. The threat is over. North Korea is back to making missiles once again.

The economy is terrible. It’s the fault of NAFTA. Our trade balance is out of whack. Impose tariffs. A global economic melt-down seems imminent. Who ever knew that the cars we make here have parts from other countries. Our farmers can’t sell soy beans. Ah-Ha, a new deal is reached on trade. Or, at least, a new deal is proposed on trade. Details, they don’t matter. We don’t  have them, actually. But, our president says, a deal is a deal. The economy is saved. Hoo-Ray.  Oh, wait, tax time is coming and I can’t deduct my state and local taxes.

Must be my fault for living in New York, where they have high taxes. Gotta pay for stuff like sewers and subways, commuter rail lines and bridges and highways. Yep, I should have moved to a state that doesn’t need those things. Just a single football stadium that can hold 30,000 people. You know, the same number of workers who pour into Penn Station every 45 minutes or so during the morning commute.

Want to talk about health care? Or using education money to buy guns for teachers in elementary schools? Want to talk about the Mueller investigation, or the continued Russian meddling in our elections? Fake news web sites run by those self-same Russians?

                                                  Topical, Once Again

How about a president being told by the family not to come to the funeral for John McCain, and retaliating by not flying the flag at half mast at the White House. All his advisors told him to do it, and he wouldn’t. Members of his family told him to do it, and he wouldn’t. Even the Republicans in Congress - who complain about Trump in whispers - told him to do it. He wouldn’t.

Finally, the American Legion demanded he do it. He did, after two days of sitting like a petulant child as reporters asked him, over and over again “Was John McCain a hero?”

“Thank you,” he Trumpeted out once or twice.

In a way, it is comforting to know that, no matter how bad things seem, our seat in this national movie house will be there next week, and the week after. The actors in the screen may change. The boat heading for the iceberg in this wheel will be replaced by the hero on a ladder while the villain attaches two or three sticks of dynamite to the bottom rung and lights it. And the lights will come up, and we will all come back next week.

And the show will go on, and on and on. And on again some more.

I wonder how it will all  end in November?