“…It’s the end of the world as we know it,
It’s the end of the world as we know it,
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”

R.E.M.    It’s The End Of The World

 
If partisan pundits are to be believed, we are apparently continuing our streak of “the most consequential election of our lifetime”. Our political discourse tends toward the apocalyptic, where we seem ever to be clinging to the brink of oblivion. We have Sean Hannity warning us that a second President Clinton guarantees the end of our nation, while Bono tells us that Trump is potentially the worst idea that ever happened to America, and The Washington Post draws upon the well worn Hitler analogy. Godwin’s Law should apply here, but the conversation has only begun, what with Glenn Beck promising that a Trump victory means the sinister ascension of the dread “Alt Right”, and Trump surrogates warning that a Hillary victory means terrorists flooding the nation and Iran shooting nuclear missiles at us. It is a difficult choice indeed, how would you like your apocalypse? Me, I am filled with enough dread over the possibility of a President whose limited vocabulary of four letter words is a perfect fit for his Twitter penchant, or the equally frightening prospect of being scolded for eight years by a Madam President who sounds uncannily like my ex wife.

Can’t something be a bad idea without it meaning the end of the world? Why can’t we insist that someone is a poor choice without suggesting that they are the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler? Our tendency toward hyperbole in our politics, with progressives drawing bogey men from the past, and conservatives drawing them from the future, demonstrates a myopic focus on the present where clear readings of history and of prophecy become blurred echoes only to be used to frighten the children and persuade the ignorant. If we honestly remembered the monsters of the past, and clearly discerned the final apocalypse, we could not in good conscience compare these two doddering senior citizens to those nightmares.

If Trump is to be crowned, as Mr. Bono suggests, potentially the worst idea that ever happened to America, there is some stiff competition:  slavery, the alien and sedition acts, Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, Jim Crow, Prohibition, Japanese internment camps, Vietnam, Roe V Wade, the election of Barak Obama… We are a government by the people, and people make mistakes… we have made many, but there are many that we have fixed, and many more mistakes that we never made. The mistakes become part of our story, the fixes add to our strength. I’m not saying we ought not do our best to avoid mistakes, I think Hillary would be one, but I’ve not seen one yet that would spell our demise. Change is not a one way street, and when a change becomes unpalatable, the people change things again.  Balance returns, young girls sing, teenage boys ride their skateboards, old men laugh… life goes on.

IMHO: We continually revert to monarchical perspectives when looking for potential leaders. They are either saviors or tyrants, christs or anti-christs. We see them as the Moses who will lead us to the promised land or the Devil who will bring us to the abyss. The end will not come from the actions of one person, but by the falling away of all. We get the leaders we deserve, and if we want better leaders, we need to be better people. We do not have an appointed monarch ruling by some version of divine right, we have a government by the people, and we elect people to represent us in leadership. Ultimately these leaders are a reflection of the voters who elect them, and those voters are always changing. All elected leaders will make mistakes, some will be mistakes; but we are a Republic, and by God’s grace we have kept it; by God’s grace we will keep it.

“Well if you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand;
I’ve seen your face before my friend, but I don’t know if you know who I am.
Well, I was there and I saw what you did, I saw it with my own two eyes,
So you can wipe off that grin- I know where you’ve been-
It’s all been a pack of lies!”

Phil Collins

Technology, with increasing speed, moves from the exclusive domain of the elite, including our governments, to the hands of the masses. The computers that existed only in large rooms of universities and government buildings a few decades ago, our teenagers now carry in their pockets. The secret cameras that were once the stuff of James Bond movies, and the real world top levels of espionage, are now available from discount catalogs, and I can see who’s at my front door from half way around the world. Where a few short years ago we became concerned with NSA surveillance, and the prying eyes of government invading the privacy of our on-line behavior or emails, the shoe is now on the other foot, and digital intrusion has become a two way street.

The hacking of the DNC, and subsequently of Colin Powell, shows that our secret communications may not always stay secret. The feigned outrage that the hacks might have been instigated by the Russian government was a juvenile like effort to displace the public’s focus from the ugly truth of the content of the communications. It’s as though your son read your teenage daughter’s diary and discovered she was doing drugs and having unprotected sex, and of course she would think the pressing issue to be your son’s invasion of her privacy. Regardless of where the hacks came from, the peek behind the curtains was a good thing. We have been promised transparency from every politician in my lifetime, but their willingness to provide it is something we now know better than to expect. Hillary’s mystery illness would never have been disclosed had the video not surfaced; she could not even give a straight answer about whether she had communicated her condition to her VP nominee. Obfuscation is the default posture even when there seems to be no need for it.

It is unfortunate, but we the people now see that we can’t trust our own politicians. There was a time when we could count on a diligent and unbiased press, but that is no longer the case. Now, like the parents of that teenage daughter, we will be sneaking our own peeks into that diary. FOIA requests, hacking, WikiLeaks, whistle blowers… we will use them all, and no doubt some secrets that should stay secret will be exposed. Collateral damage. Excuses like Hillary’s email explanations will only pass muster with older voters, and not with the tech-savvy bulk of the population. We know that Bleach-bit and hammers are not standard issue for deleting innocuous information. Videos of policing incidents have caught abuses, but have also had some negative effects. Just the same, Pandora’s Box has been opened, and the police and the public will need to adjust to this new reality. Likewise, old-school politicians like Hillary will need to realize that this is a new world, and penchants for privacy only invite the prying eyes of those more skilled in the black arts of the digital kingdom than her or her staff.

In response to the hacks of Colin Powell’s emails, and what that portends for other public figures, Megyn Kelly said, “In 2016 America, it’s no longer enough to pretend, you actually have to be a good person”. I wish it were so. At the least, I think it has become more difficult to pretend. With this new transparency comes the probable exposition of things we don’t need to know, and probably would prefer not to know. Heroes appear disappointingly mortal through an unfiltered lens. While I would like to know if Hillary has a neurological condition, I have no desire for details of hemorrhoid treatment or yeast infections. If there was a mechanism, like an independent review board that could filter and release pertinent information, a candidate’s privacy could be preserved. When we are forced to rely on Julian Assange or Russian hackers we get the whole nasty lump. When HDTV first came out, I loved it for nature shots, sports, and animated movies. What I found hard to watch were actors. You could see the pimples under their make-up, the wrinkles around their eyes… my God you could see the hair in their nostrils! We are beginning an age when our political candidates will be on full display for us in ultra high def. We will see that they are not messiahs or super heroes, but people like ourselves. We will need to make decisions on which aspects of flawed humanity disqualifies a candidate, and which aspects can be overlooked, but no longer will an honest voter engage in God-like devotion to an Obama or a Reagan. Candidates may be judged less by expositions of their faults as much as by how they respond to that exposition.

IMHO: The lesson to those with political aspirations is that if you intend to be sneaky, then you better be really good at it. If Hillary is able to pull this out, then maybe it’s enough for underhanded politicians to confine themselves to the Democratic party. If so, I can picture Dick Nixon shaking his head from the hereafter, “I should have been a democrat!” For me, I prefer Megyn Kelly’s optimistic admonition that maybe it’s time for good people to supplant the pretenders. Long ago, when I was in the throes of teenage development of character, faced with choices of probity and propriety, my rule of thumb to evaluate a situation where my rationality might be tainted by temptation, was to ask myself if I would be comfortable with my mother knowing the choice I had made. It wasn’t fool proof, but it generally clarified my self-deception. Likewise politicians in this time of declining privacy need to gauge their behavior by what they would do in plain sight of the electorate. If their choices come to light, they need not be entangled in a web of deception that fools no one; if their actions are not hacked, leaked or otherwise snooped on they can rest in the fact that they have been a good person, and goodness I think, still makes for a better politician.