Donald Trump was shot in the ear Saturday at a rally in Pennsylvania. Or he was hit with a flying shard of teleprompter. Or he used a concealed razor blade to slice open his ear in a false flag operation designed to portray him as a martyr in the fight to the death for America. All three possibilities are being promoted by after-the-fact commentators.
His would-be assassin, a 20-year-old named Thomas Matthew Crooks, is unable to throw light on the issue, having been shot dead by Secret Service agents. Early details on Crooks are a mix of left-wing and right-wing signifiers. Eyewitnesses claim they watched him climb on a roof adjacent the rally. They informed the police but were ignored.
Conspiracy theorists are gearing up for a busy summer.
Trump has since given credit to God for saving his life, which is perhaps the biggest conspiracy theory of all. God has not been known for deliberately keeping old folks alive since the days of the Old Testament, no matter how essential their followers think they are.
As people get older, the process of individuation slows, stops, and reverses itself. People as disparate as Donald Trump and Joe Biden start having more and more things in common, such as the belief that God thinks they’re indispensable.
________
In 1907, Elbert Hubbard, a homespun advocate for basic American common sense, said, “The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.” Translated into French, attributed to Charles de Gaulle, and then translated back into English, it gained economy and elegance, and became: “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”
Elbert Hubbard no doubt borrowed his saying from Seneca or Aristotle, because since civilization began people in powerful positions have gotten old and decrepit, and have insisted on holding onto power. In most cases, the ends of their careers are marked by horrible mistakes. History is littered with the corpses of senile leaders and the people who trusted their judgment.
A pathetic vanity is simply one of many cognitive deficits that afflict old farts. No matter how educated, exercised, and competent we are, we start faltering when we reach our 70s. Our cognitive flexibility goes first, then any sense of proportion, then the ability to look over our own shoulders. Then we start finding our keys in the refrigerator and we actually send all those letters to the editor we’ve written—it’s a chronicle of inescapable loss and embarrassment, hard to contemplate before it happens, impossible to acknowledge by the time it does. A lack of power, in this instance, is a blessing for us and the people around us.
Elbert Hubbard also said, “The thing we fear we bring to pass.”
I’m not sure if this is common sense or not, but it seems to be true in the case of old age.
________
Maybe the folks at Marvel could come up with Indispensable Man Comics, with a basic plotline postulating a planet afflicted with a genocidal war or two, a climate crisis, an economic collapse caused by exhaustion of resources, uncontrollable sea level rise, and a pandemic killing millions.
Confronted with this scenario, Indispensable Man, a humanlike being exiled to Earth from a distant galaxy, shows up and makes a few pertinent suggestions which are immediately adopted by all the movers and shakers of the planet. Within weeks, everything is fine again.
Indispensable Man goes back to his fortress in Antarctica to cool off and rest up for the next issue of his comic, leaving a grateful world to wonder, “Who was that man in glittering spandex, the one who solved civilization’s latest swarm of crises with his wisdom, intelligence, and alien charm?”
So far the folks at Marvel have not returned my calls.
The mass solution of insoluble predicaments can happen in comic books, but it’s vanishingly rare in our real world, where all available heroes, save Lassie, are merely human. Our problems exceed the capacity of one person to fix. Anyone who claims to be able to fix them is lying to himself, or is in the middle of a psychotic break, or is a con man with no curbs on his ambitions.
All three possibilities are being promoted for both Biden and Trump.
________
Common sense explains Biden as an example of the non-resilience of old age, when a lack of sleep, physical exhaustion, antihistamines, and stress can shut down body and brain. That’s what happened to him, as far as I can tell, during his debate with Trump.
Common sense pegs Trump as a textbook case of frontotemporal dementia, which would be more apparent if one of its symptoms wasn’t—in rage-blinded America—the self-indulgence of a three-year-old throwing a tantrum in a supermarket checkout line.
Biden’s nobody’s-in-there performance has resulted in calls for him to make his first term as president his last. Most people who saw the debate are convinced that the rigors of another campaign would kill or incapacitate him. Many of us think that Biden has already sacrificed his health and happiness to his job. We wish he would declare victory—he has plenty of moments of triumph in his resume—and move to the house next door to Mar-A-Lago, enjoying the festivities while the neighborhood is still above water.
By the time you read this, Biden may have announced he’s leaving office at the end of his term. Probably not, but it would be good news for those of us who know what happens when powerful men stay too long at the fair.
“President for Life” sounds good to someone who wants to die in the saddle, as it were, especially if the odds are against that same someone living four more years. But save for Teddy Roosevelt replacing William McKinley, a president dying in office has been catastrophic for the country in the past and likely would be again.
I don’t expect Biden to go willingly. He’s lived a life as ensconced in zeitgeist as it’s possible to be, so much so that his political life, with its institutions, friendships, transactions, crises and battles, looks like reality to him.
But look at what he’s facing. Even if he had Indispensable Man as his sidekick, the zeitgeist is batshit crazy, murderous and suicidal, well past its safe-to-consume date. Our civilization’s psychotic break has already happened. We live in a landscape of cognitive fragments. The more you see them as the world you must conquer, the crazier you are.
The lives of Biden and Trump recall the Buddhist homily that first you must conquer fear, then you must conquer the power that comes from conquering fear, and then you must conquer old age.
Nobody conquers old age.
________
Maybe the folks at Marvel could, after all the superheroes, finally devote a series to Common Sense Man. He wouldn’t have to be an alien or a dog. He could be an average American voter, one who works for a living, one whose outlook on life isn’t marked by magical thinking, one who thinks critically and skeptically and pragmatically. He could be a person who has come back from tragedy, and who has had enough success in life to believe in personal efficacy. A sense of humor would help, as would the ability to let go of the past when it starts taking up too much space in his head. He would know when to ask for advice, and he could recognize when unsolicited advice was purely somebody else’s destructive personal agenda. He would be able to love, trust, and cherish other people in the face of their faults, provided one of those faults wasn’t being a psychopath.
(If you’re worried about my use of gendered language, it goes without saying that Common Sense Man could be Common Sense Woman or Common Sense Anything Else. Common sense is the operative phrase here.)
Common sense is useful in identifying the differences between Biden and Trump as long as those differences persist. Here’s a sampling:
Biden’s movie, the one he thinks he is living, is Rocky. Trump’s is The Godfather. In traditional dramatic theory, Biden’s movie is comedy, Trump’s is tragedy.
Biden’s movie is about a good guy. Trump’s is about a bad guy.
Biden hires people smarter than he is whereas Trump sees any underling as a potential rival and makes sure they know he will destroy them if they question his authority.
Trump’s personal relationships end in bitterness and lawsuits. Biden’s end in sadness.
Biden has to fake anger to cover his sadness and Trump doesn’t, because Trump cannot admit to feeling grief.
Biden: empathetic; Trump: ruthless.
Biden has enemies who can empathize with him. Trump has friends who identify with him.
Biden works in the midst of people who are hyperaware of any stumble, verbal gaffe, loss of control, loss of strength, incontinence. Trump, not so much.
The danger for Biden is that all of his good qualities will be sacrificed to his struggle for power, and there won’t be much left of him when that happens. The danger for Trump is that all his bad qualities will be enhanced in his struggle for power, and enhanced further if he wins, and his presence, damaged as it is, will loom ever larger on the national horizon.
Trump loses friends even when he wins. Biden wins friends even when he loses.
I could go on. Common sense is pretty good at discerning differences between people, and it’s not bad at telling good from evil if you give it a chance.
________
It’s too bad that Thomas Matthew Crooks didn’t use common sense when he set out to shoot Trump, because regardless of his motive, common sense suggests that he would have outlived the man unless he did something really stupid. The penalties for pissing on someone’s grave aren’t as bad as they are for killing them. The satisfactions are roughly the same.
Thomas Matthew Crooks went and did something really stupid anyway.
He ruined his life, he ruined his family’s lives and the lives of the people he killed and injured and the lives of their families, and he probably ruined the lives of the Secret Service personnel who killed him. In doing so, he eliminated the psychic distance between himself and the man he apparently hated.
Common Sense Man needs to show up about now, before anyone else gets shot, before anyone else wrecks anyone else’s life, before rage becomes the sole operative emotion for the country. Sitting back, taking a deep breath or two, waiting for your limbic system to calm down, deciding what’s important in the big scheme of things: that’s common sense in action, and it’s the one thing that can guide this country back to sanity.