A little poem from my childhood:
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door… (slam!)Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…Antigonish, by Hugh Mearns
The word “Antigonish” conjures up a different memory for me: The late 1960s. A sparsely populated Nova Scotia beach. A charming and regular appearance by a contingent of nuns, in very decorous swimsuits, from a nearby convent. My brother, four months old, piled into a car and small RV with the rest of us and the dog, brought along for the annual summer holiday. My brother, on the beach, in his carrier, under an umbrella to shade him from the sun, chewing on his feet. (Would that, in my old age, such a thing were even remotely possible, LOL.)
I remember.
The poem was inspired by a legend, that of an apparition in a haunted Nova Scotia house, and it was included in the writings of American author Hugh Mearns as part of a play he wrote in 1899.
Donald Trump is–at least in the eyes of the Left–the least likely manifestation of a ghostly apparition that there ever was. He’s super-in-their-face-offensive. He’s Satan (for those on the Left who believe in such a thing). He’s Hitler and a Nazi (for those who look to a more contemporary evil, even if they have difficulty calling out those who are Nazis and those who are anti-Semites, and explaining the difference). He’s an authoritarian, a dictator, and the greatest danger ever to “our democracy” and the singular person who will make the American experiment not survivable if you’re a particular kind of progressive.
All you have to do is listen to the media’s attempts (See, “Kimmel, Jimmy) to believe otherwise.
So, yesterday, we had the moment where, as Donald, Melania, and the presidential entourage stepped foot on the escalator in the UN pavilion, suddenly, it stopped. I was reminded of Trump’s “golden escalator” traverse from 2015.
Who actually believes the feeble excuses as to the reason why the UN escalator was halted? See Gibbs, Rule 39. (Especially when they are conjoined with the almost simultaneous supposed “breakdown” of Trump’s teleprompter. Please. Rule 39. Look it up.)
Almost my favorite moment of the day, though came as the escalator stopped and Melania–who evidently wasn’t going to be put off by an outbreak of sillybuggery on the part of her third-world hosts–just forged ahead up the stairs, leaving the rest–including the President of the United States–to trail in her wake. 😆
That the Secret Service is–apparently–only just coming round to the notion that the fact that the escalator stopped working at the very moment Donald and Melania stepped foot on it could have gone in a very different direction, is pretty much par for the course. Much work left to do there.
Trump’s not going away. To paraphrase Cole Porter, “Seventy-Seven million Americans can’t be wrong.” Their opinions might be open to debate. But they’re no longer up for immediate dismissal or supercilious condescension from their ‘betters.’
And that–when it comes to actual democracy–is a very good thing.
