The debate last week bummed me out. I gave it time to simmer and let other commenters have at it. However, it seems like nobody saw what I saw or reacted as I have.
Trump and Biden weren’t talking about different goals, they were talking about different levels of existence. Trump kept going back to concrete reality; mostly his accomplishments. “I saved the Pac 10, I got the ventilators made, I closed the airports on day X…” Love him or hate him, the Big Orange Goofball at least spewed out lists of things that are measurable.
I’ll start with the least controversial topic covered, because I want to see the forest, not the trees. Trump mentioned restarting college football among his accomplishments. Do I give a shit about the Pac 10? Not really. Do I think the President needs to be fucking around with football? Nope. Do I think universities ought to have better things to do with their time? Definitely! But a football game is an event. It either happens or it doesn’t. I can evaluate the results in real time, right here on earth.
That’s my point. Trump talked about things he did and events that really happened. He never stops boasting in his uniquely ridiculous way but his arguments can be measured with units: “The number of games played by athletic meatheads is X.” The events also actually happened. This is different from someone like Al Gore who lives in the future which is more or less far enough away to avoid responsibility. I’m sick of “we’re all gonna’ die from some random environmental panic in thirty years” and prefer “the football game happened on Friday.” Maybe Trump’s Pac 10 event is a good thing or maybe it’s a bad thing but it’s definitely a thing.
Biden was talking to an entirely different world. It started with Biden’s first and most formidable attack. He led with a litany of how many people have died of COVID. Here’s a snippet from the transcript:
“…200,000 dead. As you said, over seven million infected in the United States. We, in fact, have 4% of the world’s population, 20% of the deaths. 40,000 people a day are contracting COVID. In addition to that, about between 750 and 1000 people a day are dying.”
I was paying attention as Biden listed all those statistics. One can quibble about details, but that stuff happened in reality. Then things went sideways.
Leaping off from the solid base he’d just built to pure speculation, Biden argued that all this was due to Trump. Like Trump was in the White House’s basement, playing with his “unhinged Dr. Moreau junior experiment kit” and he caused every COVID death personally. It was dissonant to me. No matter who the president happens to be, he’s not running around with a dart gun filled with poison.
I had to pause and relisten. He’d swerved so fast he’d lost me. I didn’t easily follow where Biden was going with this. I simply don’t think of the president as my pal. I don’t think of a virus as subservient to government control. I don’t think a thing that emerged in China and has killed people in 214 countries takes orders from DC. And most clearly to me, any death is tragic but there’s no avoiding it.
The minute COVID got loose, people were going to die. Whether it came from the Wuhan Lab or a bat sandwich, people were going to die. Whether we fuck the economy into the ground and cower behind hermetically sealed doors or get naked and roll around in a great clusterfuck, people are going to die. There was no “solution” to COVID that is without death. It doesn’t matter if the president is Trump, Biden, or Bugs Bunny… death was inevitable.
Biden was shooting for the “Trump is the cause of COVID” angle. I think that gets a lot of traction with his supporters. It seemed flaky and weird to me.
Biden piled on with emotional content. Apparently, Trump was insufficiently sad about the thing. Here’s another snippet from the transcript: “When he was presented with that number, he said, ‘It is what it is.’ Well, it is what it is because you are who you are. That’s why it is.”
I’m pretty sure this makes sense to the right person. It’s a mess to me.
First of all, what the hell did he actually say? Did he imply that it’s bad that “I am who I am” because I ought to be someone more important? Did Biden just mansplain to me that I’m an oppressed rube? I don’t feel oppressed. Trump doesn’t even know my name but neither does Biden.
Deeper at the heart of it is complaining about Presidential emotions. Heart disease, cancer, suicide, and accidents are all in the top ten of “why people die”. They all suck. Would they suck less if Trump weeps every day over it? Is that the president’s job? I don’t expect anyone (including Trump or Biden) to assuage my butthurt about how much it sucks that people die of heart disease?
How can a rational person bitch about the proper level of concern; particularly in a debate? What’s the right response to that line of attack? Should Trump say “I cower at my desk over the immensity of human suffering from 9:35 am to 9:50 am every Tuesday… it’s right here on my calendar.” I suppose the Pope might do that but not a political representative. Also, what amount of emotion anyone should display on Thursday, October 8th over heart disease, or COVID, or leukemia? Who put Biden in charge of evaluating the proper emotional distress one should experience? Is there a chart somewhere? Is ten minutes enough? Do we need thirty? Will that “fix” it?
I’m just getting rolling. More soon.