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GUEST COMMENTARY - Pundits, a day later, ruminate about who won the September 10th "presidential debate," but that is the wrong question. The most important revelation from Tuesday night's clusterfuck of bad theater ought to be this: the patient won't survive. The bedridden train-wreck sprawled across the gurney in the hospice unit is the United States of America—and the debate wasn't destined to be revelatory. We already knew that the corpse, writhing and contorting in agony, will need life-support first and a skilled embalmer soon enough. The debate proved for the billionth time that the greatest country on earth has less hope than a popsicle on the surface of the sun.
The debate wasn't about Kamala Harris—she is the default mode, the automatic pilot, a celebration of generic items, a slinky on a long staircase, a golf course watering system in a terminal draught, a row of telephone poles on an endless train ride. Forget about her. She does not exist. AI created her.
This debate was about Donald Trump. If an alien spacecraft lands on your street and parks next to a Honda Fit, the make of the car becomes irrelevant. If you are waking in the morning with a blister on your little toe and notice a tumor growing out of your side as big as the bathroom sink, you no longer attend to the foot discomfort.
Trump is our measuring stick, our gauge of disease, our face of national distress. If Trump had a debate with Jesus himself you wouldn't see it as the bantering back and forth between good and evil—you'd look at Trump and ask, "What the fuck is that?" In any context, Trump does not belong. He is a walking double take. You look at Trump as if your arm falls off and blood streams from your empty shoulder. He is bad shit that should not be there—but there he is.
If Trump had a debate with Jesus himself you wouldn't see it as the bantering back and forth between good and evil—you'd look at Trump and ask, "What the fuck is that?"
For Trump is not the typical American occupant of our national throne—a guy who merely dispenses weapons to right-wing dictators in the name of freedom and the memory of the founding fathers. No, Trump's vileness resembles, but supersedes a bad mushroom trip. A close up screenshot of Trump's face makes you long for a hang gliding mishap and a seat in the waiting room adjacent to the furnaces of hell.
But, if you are on your toes, you note that it is not Trump at all. It is about us. What forces us, the raw mass of humanity born into the worst of all times, to give this vile, florid, and stupid monster a seat at the head of the table?
What terrible rot eats us alive and, in the process causes us to see Trump as an answer to life's most difficult question? In the final, and darkest hour in all human history, what must we do to redeem ourselves? Trump!
And what did Trump tell us in this thigh-smacking comedy called the "Sixth Extinction Slapstick Special"?
For starters Trump told us that all the murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and gangsters dispersed across the entirety of creation have been systematically funneled to the U.S. southern border. All the jails and mental institutions from the stellar nurseries of the Orion Nebula to the Barbary coast have been drained of their residents. The universe, thus, suddenly has no crime, save for "migrant crime" in the land of stars and stripes.
We have all the crime from everywhere and everywhere has no crime at all.
Can you imagine that maybe a couple billion years hence, a team of alien explorers lands on the burnt remnants of our planet and discovers the video of Tuesday's debate?
Trump also told us that these alien thugs have been eating our dogs and cats. For a man who almost chose canine executioner, Kristi Noem, to be his vice president, and who fathered two of the world's most cruel trophy hunters, this sudden passion for animal welfare caught many of us off guard.
He argued back and forth with Kamala Harris about which one fracked the hardest. Picture two arsonists bickering over which one owns the largest gas can, and you get the idea.
He informed us that Harris is a radical Marxist, coming for your guns, Hummers, and bacon.
He let us know that the "Democrat Party" executes babies after birth and that every legal scholar from D.C. to the Big Bang had been clamoring to send abortion back to the states. 100% of our legal minds from Clarence Thomas to Perry Mason had, according to Trump, opposed Rowe v Wade since the universe began as expanding hot plasma. Not a single legal scholar had even one kind word for Rowe, and everyone knows it.
He also said stuff like this:
We did a phenomenal job with the pandemic. We handed them over a country where the economy and where the stock market was higher than it was before the pandemic came in. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. We made ventilators for the entire world. We got gowns. We got masks. We did things that nobody thought possible. And people give me credit for rebuilding the military. They give me credit for a lot of things. But not enough credit for the great job we did with the pandemic. But the only jobs they got were bounce-back jobs. These were jobs, bounce back. And it bounced back and it went to their benefit. But I was the one that created them. They know it and so does everybody else.
And, if you crave more, here you go:
And look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk -- not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating -- they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame. As far as rallies are concerned, as far -- the reason they go is they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great again. It's a very simple phrase: Make America Great Again. She's destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn't have a chance of success. Not only success. We'll end up being Venezuela on steroids.
Can you imagine that maybe a couple billion years hence, a team of alien explorers lands on the burnt remnants of our planet and discovers the video of Tuesday's debate? What will our alien visitors say to one another? Perhaps they'll say, "Those dumb fucks where watching this and chewing on popcorn while their planet roasted."
Perhaps the cruelest aliens will talk shit about our long imploded civilization: “Thank the god, Aghjestymunbo, that these crazy motherfuckers killed themselves before they learned how easy intergalactic technology is!”
I am not certain that billions of years from now our aliens will know what popcorn is. I also have no idea if intergalactic wanderers will have the requisite sense of humor to appreciate Donald Trump. If they do, all will not be lost.
(Phil Wilson is a retired mental health worker who has written for Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Resilience, Current Affairs, The Future Fire, The Hampshire Gazette, and other publications. Phil’s writings are posted regularly at Nobody’s Voice. This article was first featured in CommonDreams.org.)
