As per an earlier posting, there is a sense that this nation has taken not only a hard right turn in its politics but also in its whole demeanor. The vinegar of the sixties has turned to venom and the idea of having any respect on any level for those who hold public office or who work in the public sector has, admittedly with some justification, left us almost entirely. Those who occupy the halls of congress, on both sides of the aisle, have failed miserably at their charter to govern and as a direct result of a calculated plan of obstruction on the part of the GOP, nothing has moved in a forward direction for now nearly eight years. What is scary, though, is not just the thought of this obstructionism continuing in to the next administration but the thought of who might be in that administration. It is election season and the race is on.
The “jackass” candidates started out on what seemed to be a fairly decent playing field, discussing issues and agreeing to disagree on certain specific points. There was sufficient agreement on the problems at hand with curious disagreement as to the solutions. And while the one candidate came across as having a single issue focus, the other took on a much broader, almost waterfront agenda. Then, for some reason, the whole tenor darkened and slid into a bit of name calling and the usual nonsense we see in campaigns. Issues which have little or no bearing on a future administration or the ability to function as such became the main course and sour apples were all over the place. By well in to the race, we were now left with one candidate with more baggage – real or imagined – than a flight to Colorado on a ski weekend and one not only continuing to be, in our opinion, single issue but resorting to raising matters sometimes totally out of sync with fact and most of the time out of sync with relevance, a status I fully blame the campaign manager who is not happy unless and until he is trolling. It is no less than pitiful and,in the long run, may well damage the party and its chances to end up on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The “elephant” on the other hand is quite a different story.
The field of candidates brought to the stage performers who have curiously failed to address anything in the real world and constantly go off on tangents which resemble Fantasy Island gone amuck.While the field of candidates started out at seventeen, with a steady menu of theocracy, bureaucracy and hypocrisy , the final candidate poses the most fearful of possibilities.

The loudmouth from Manhattan is clearly who has no respect for anything or anyone except himself and whose entire agenda has been to get rich by manipulating laws and and exploiting trade policies. His entire candidacy is capitalizing on fear, misinformation, crass ignorance and xenophobia.
To quote a columnist form Australia , he has been “ gaslighting ” this country for months. His blatant and obvious failure to grasp even the basics of government serve to make ones head spin. He continues to spout conspiracy theories as if they were fact, citing as his “ reliable source” some of the more moronic right winger bloggers and twitter posts. When challenged on some of these nonsensical pronouncements, his fall back is that “ I am only retweeting what I read”, as though a presidential candidate has no responsibility to make even a cursory effort at fact checking !
There is no effort at concealing blatant disdain for the less fortunate among us, for any diversity of ideas and being disguised as patriotism, a return to the whole white supremacy notion from an earlier time. Support for his path to Pennsylvania Avenue rests with the likes of the former grand wizard of the KKK, the cast of Duck Dynasty, the brainless Ted Nugent and a likewise lunatic, Alex Jones. There is constant belittling of handicapped persons and those whose lives have been destroyed by disasters. We won’t even venture in to the mire of his opinion of women ! All this, as distasteful as it is, is being fed, like kerosene on a smoldering fire, by the current political climate, not to mention being enabled by the media. That he is the presumptive nominee for the GOP should give pause to wonder just how far down that road to hell we have ventured . And here is the really frightening part – support for this posture is very widespread. The dark side has come to the forefront and it should have set off the alarm in every community but it hasn’t.
As noted earlier, we have taken a far and hard turn to the right and unfortunately, none seem to awaken to that fact and nor do they see the course on which we have embarked. Gone are the days when partnerships were workable and there was a sense of community – at least on a policy level – and the profiteering mode rules again as it did in the eight years prior to the current administration. Apparently we as a nation have learned nothing and one knows what happens to those who fail to learn from history.

In the early sixties, a school of dramatic presentation arose in which the things seemed to get way out of hand and “Absurdist Fiction “ was born. In this, the logical and compelling were reduced to the irrational and the illogical. It was coined by Martin Esslin as the “Theatre of the Absurd”.
Welcome to the theatre – the curtain gone up !