Talk about anxiety

 

"The Scream," by Edvard Munch

     Anxiety. The fight-or-flight instinct hardwired into our brains by 100,000 years of evolution gets short-circuited by our complex modern world. You can't stay and can't go, but sit frozen, scoured by whatever the hell is the matter. Or you flee and are chased by it. You both sit and run, mentally, as the problem harries you in a circle, from pillar to post. The car alarm shrieks and shrieks and you can't shut it off and you can't ignore it so you try to do both at the same time and do neither. You are torn apart.
     The fallout from the recent presidential debate disaster is a textbook example of anxiety disorder. After the first two minutes of the debate, when President Joe Biden's face appeared on the screen, vacant, stricken, his mouth an open rictus, his eyes gazing down and to the right, as if crushed in shame, the damage was done. Self-immolation, defeat. At that point, he could have grabbed a straw hat and bamboo cane tossed to him from off camera and started refuting Trump in a Gilbert & Sullivan patter song while tap dancing rings around him, and it would not have mattered.  He was cooked, finished. The shock rippled across the world.
     The immediate thought among those who would protect the United States from four more years being molested by Donald Trump and his gang of revanchist stooges was: Biden must go. We can't run that man on the screen, gaping in senile infirmity while Trump rages and lies. If we do, the American voters will take the critical judgment they can't direct at Trump and use it to dismiss Biden. Fair? No. But stop the presses. Life ain't fair and politics is double unfair. Ask Howard Dean. 

      So the Democrats need a more dynamic candidate, like Hillary Clinton ... whoops, she lost. Like Gavin Newsom then ... but isn't he a Californian?  Or Pete Buttigieg (gay). Or Gretchen Whitmer (a woman, like Hillary). Kamala Harris then (a woman, Black and the vice-president). How many Trump voters will these candidates lure over to the light?

      Not enough, perhaps. Pollsters suggest all those options might do worse than Biden. At least now, though that could change. Unless it doesn't change. Unless Biden is the best we've got. The best hope for America.
     "He must go" quickly morphed into "He must stay." First, because Biden isn't about to go. He's the president. He powered himself to his plum job and he isn't about to step aside just because he can't arrange his features in a look of intelligence for five minutes when his job depends on it. A fairly low bar. So we stay with Biden. Yay! We're ridin' with Biden!

     Although the events he staged trying to wipe away memory of the event he just royally botched also fell flat. Crap yourself on live TV, and there isn't much interest in how precisely you clean up. And even the clean-up was messy. When George Stephanopoulos asked him on ABC how he'll feel if Nov. 5 comes and Trump crushes him, Biden said that so long as he tried his best, then that will be okay. Oh my God. That's worse than any gaffe. Not what you want your would-be hero to say. "Well George, in the end, it doesn't matter if I get that baby out of the burning building or not. What matters is I tried..." Actually it does matter. To the mom anyway. A lot. We don't care if Joe Biden feels good about himself. We want the baby not to burn.
     "Let's all try our best so we'll take our loss philosophically" is not a banner Dems will flock to. That's the white flag of defeat. As is denouncing those still pointing at the debate performance saying, "You know, that's really worrisome..."  Issuing demands for loyalty, to ignore the evidence of your eyes and shrug off unfitness — don't we already have one candidate doing that aplenty?

     Does all of this mean Trump wins? That providence, which has rolled a red carpet in front of Donald Trump literally since the day he was born, is ushering him back to the White House? Like all good nightmares, we thrash against our fate, but we're being tumbled in a torrent, over the falls. Trump was ahead in the polls before the debate. A relative phoned me to ask why, why, why the media is harping on Biden's decrepitude and not Trump's latest misdeeds, which seem to include showing up all over a truckload of newly released Jeffrey Epstein material. The man is literally accused of raping children. I remember a time when that would matter in presidential politics.

     Why why why? my relative cried.
     Do you want me to answer the question? I kept saying.
     "Why?" he wondered, never letting me speak. "Why?"
     Had he allowed me to respond, I would have said that Biden revealing himself to be as out-of-it as Republicans claim is now news, to the Democrats anyway, while Trump being a liar and a rapist and a fraud and a traitor, well, we've been showered with that daily for nearly a decade. Focusing on any particular Trump fib or fantasy has a so-what-else-is-new, and-Napoleon-escaped-from-Elba quality at this point.
     What to do? Anyone lashed by anxiety knows that the only thing to do is let it happen. Lean into your intrusive thoughts. Close your eyes and power forward, head down, legs churning. "If you find yourself going through hell," Winston Churchill said, "keep going."

     I wish I could say if only Biden would resign, then our problems would end. They wouldn't. We'd immediately be flung into a spiked pit of a new set of problems. The moment a candidate is identified the targeting systems lock in and blast away. Kamala Harris has been failing to meet expectations for four years. The process of selecting someone else would be messy and time consuming while Trump offers himself as the golden calf/savior he is already considered to be by 43 percent of the country. There seems to be no solution because there is no solution. November is coming and the only hope is that so many people cast a ballot for Not Trump that we move from the election phase to the beating back whatever Second Insurrection Trump has got planned phase. Talk about anxiety.