Tsunami of Tsupid

One of the things I find most appealing about the Japanese anime art form is that you often hear characters encourage others by saying “Do your best!” Or characters who have been worried recover their courage and with renewed resolve lift a fist into the air and declare, “I’ll do my best!”

Some of us remember when you didn’t need to watch a cartoon from overseas to find that sentiment expressed. In fact, it wasn’t all that long ago when it was expected of each of us, all the time.

No longer.

Our standard now is not to achieve the most of which we’re capable but instead the minimum that will get us by. Sometimes, if we can cheat, not even that.

It shows, and it will be our ruin.

Nor is it our individual failure. We’re seeking the dead minimum as a country and a culture, too.

There can be no doubt that it has been eight years and change since we had a president who is mentally sound. It has been 16 years and change since we had a decent man as president. It has been 37 years since we had a president who was the man the job demanded.

As the quality of our leaders has declined, so have we. We’ve allowed it. We haven’t demanded better.

The president of the United States has several projects underway, none of them of much use to the country. Those which are useful are done as theatrical productions rather than competently executed governance.

The president is of the view that the important part of any story or event is that he be seen as the hero. But he is not the hero of anything, with the possible exception of his restoration of the ice skating rink in Central Park — and it would be a safe bet that even that project was undertaken with other people’s money in the hope that he would be admired. His mental illness has been around for a long time, unlike Joe Biden’s (unless you consider dishonesty and stupidity to be mental illnesses).

Speaking of the deteriorating Biden, you might have noticed that the president, Donald J. Trump, spends a substantial amount of time continuing to campaign in last year’s election. He and his lickspittles are investigating every aspect of the previous administration, not because it can do any possible good but because Trump is entirely grudge-driven. The fact that there is no one whose opinion is worth having who hasn’t already written off Bugout Joe as one of the country’s worst presidents, certainly the worst this millennium (with the possible exception of Trump himself, who is well in the running though like Biden he, too, has insanity as a defense).

The indictment against Trump would take many pages, and that is just the obvious stuff. The indictment against the opposition would be just as long and just as obvious. Trump’s actual opponent last November is not fit for any known job. She is an unsympathetic character in a bad show of the sort that exists to torment those who can’t afford cable and haven’t figured out streaming.

And that’s the point. Somewhere in the last decade or so, we’ve decided that instead of seeking the best person for the job, or at least someone for whom such a case could be made without provoking laughter, we’ll not just choose the lesser of evils but make a contest out of it: how unqualified can a candidate be and still win?

The Roman poet Juvenal, at about the time the Gospels were being written, spoke of “bread and circuses,” with the idea that the Roman people had grown so useless that as long as they were given something to eat and kept entertained they would pay no attention to their governance or their civic duties. Juvenal was right, and the decline of the Roman empire continued. Italy hasn’t really recovered, though there is a glimmer of hope in the current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. (Europe over all is joining the U.S. in pursuit of cultural suicide, with no-longer-Great Britain leading the charge. No one in recent years would have supposed the Western world’s hope for salvation would come from Italy.)

Trump is the latter-day personification of bread and circuses, casting himself as the ring leader. Also lion tamer, acrobat, juggler, guy shot out of the cannon, trapeze artist, and monkey that rides a unicycle. He is not good at any of these things. But he might be marginally better than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, whose party, after all, champions the policies of importing millions of illegal aliens and letting men pretend to be women so they can hang out in their locker rooms and defeat them in sports, in the fashion of 1980s East Germany.

Trump also is big on giveaways, for which you will pay. He likes to call others “RINO” — Republican In Name Only — though no one better fits the description than he does. He was never a Republican until he and Fox “news” apparently cooked up a deal in 2015.

For instance, he toyed with a run for president in 2000. As New York Magazine put it:

“In late 1999, Donald Trump spent time and money exploring the self-evidently absurd notion that a shady real estate developer with a side hustle in self-help books could win the White House. With former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura occupying the governor’s mansion in Minnesota, there was strong whiff of populism in the air. To Trump it smelled like opportunity —- at least for publicity if not for power.” He would have run in the Reform Party, the Ross Perot-founded vanity project for loud rich guys.

In New York, where the politics are corrupt, party identity is often like a middle-aged swinger party where unattractive spouses are traded for the night for different unattractive spouses. For instance, when Democrat amateur politician Michael Bloomberg decided to run for mayor in 2001, a local professional Democrat named Mark Green had the Democrat nomination in the bag, so Bloomberg ran as a Republican. (Another example is John V. Lindsay, who was elected mayor as a Republican; he threw his car keys in the Democrat bowl to run for president in 1972, but suffered from inability to perform.) Those are Republicans in name only, and Trump is among them.

Trump’s only principle, as it has always been, is what’s in it for Trump. He has no philosophy but himself. He is not a bright man and his only talent is relieving the dimwitted of their money and their votes.

It is difficult to elect such a person president. The Democrats would have to work hard if they were to be defeated by Trump. But in 2016 they pulled it off. They came close in 2020, but the foul stench of Trumpism so irritated the country that sure-loser Joe Biden somehow won, from his basement Barcalounger, anyway. He spent the next four years proving that he was probably worse then Trump. (I do wonder how much better off the country might be if it had re-elected Trump in 2020 — which it didn’t — and as a result given him less revenge to seek. In any case, we’d have been done with him by now, and our entertainment might have become watching Trump being fitted for an orange jumpsuit.)

The point is that when the monstrously unqualified Trump ran for president, the Democrats sank to the occasion and managed to find someone capable, then almost capable, of losing to him. It was a tremendous accomplishment.

With his moronic tariffs, Trump fell in the polls, but the Democrats have made short work of that, too. Beyond support for guys cosplaying girls, the party of opposition to Lincoln decided they had a sure loser in fomenting violence against enforcement of the country’s immigration laws. They may be right.

Incapable of governing because he is a loudmouthed idiot, Trump instead established a dark situation comedy of an administration. It is made up almost entirely of second-rate television personalities whose names were known not because they are good at anything but because they were once moderately acceptable at pretending on Fox Trump Channel to be good at something.

As a result we have the director of national intelligence making what is apparently an anti-Ukraine video apologizing for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was Hillary! Clinton, possibly breaking with tradition long enough to tell the truth just once, who accused Tulsi Gabbard of being a Russian asset. (Though she might also have been worried that Bill found Tulsi cute — after all, Tulsi has a skunk-stripe hairdo, just like Bill’s mother, though Virginia Kelley’s was better.)

The entire administration, up to and including the president, has that sitcom aspect of managing to be wrong even when it is right. Enforcing immigration law? Fine — shut up and do it, don’t blather on so as to make the situation worse. Trying to rebuild the military? Again, a worthy goal that would be more laudable if there weren’t a useless ink monster who doesn’t know how to work a cellular telephone in charge.

Then there are the things for which there is no excuse at all, such as selling out our country and our allies to our enemies because they flatter the fake-orange fat man.

And the whole thing is recorded before a live studio audience of Republican congressmen and senators who have decided that their attenuated power is worth more than their immortal souls. If there were any sense in the Western world today, after next year’s elections we’d have divided government. But don’t lose faith in the Democrats. They can still blow it and probably will.

Are there any statesmen anymore? Both parties used to have them. I suppose there are a few left, but they don’t get coverage, because they’re not all that entertaining, and entertainment is all that sells. The closest to a statesman who gets any airtime is the Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman, and part of his appeal is that he had a stroke so people can point and laugh when he struggles a little to speak.

As entertaining as we find the collapse of Western civilization, the real belly laughs can be heard echoing over the hills and oceans, coming from Russia and China.

We’ll one day remember when doing our best was the thing to do, and how we lost everything when we stopped even making the attempt.