Congenial-speak #6

A tweak of the title felt nice. The sub-title A DFL Boyhood in Minnesota became Growing up Democratic. This accomplishes two things. It broadens the reach to those out-of-state readers who have no idea what the DFL is, just that it is a progressive idea of the main Demagogue party, counterpart to the GOP which, for the purposes of my story and book, is all that matters in the end. “Growing up Democratic” also encompasses the liberalism that ensconced my early, EARLY years on this marble, on this chute, on this ladder to the next great compromise. That said, tweaked for any ambiguity, I continue my current thread of stories that ended up on the editing room floor:

Trump had never done much for me. He was just another one of the born-with-silver spoon-in-mouth club. I never followed him, never even knew he had stepped up to the political pate before 2016. His show The Apprentice made me sick, as most “reality” shows do. In the summer of 2015 I think I first hear of his candidacy in the largest pack of Republicans I had ever seen. Not many of them offered any sound opinions on or solutions to the ills of society. Kasich I thought was the only one who had America in mind. He was the one Republican with the rhetoric I grew up opposing. The rest, for the most part, were barely viable politicians. They seemed more than willing to abridge the constitution at will. Some were paranoid, had indomitable egos, put money at the end of their tunnel vision view of America, or lacked a respect and inking of qualification for the job.

MSNBC was my new best friend. I discovered it in my state room even before we left Lauderdale. I lay there as my wife was out meeting the rest of the ship. Room service came a few times. If my wife came back momentarily she said “You and your politics,” and headed for the sushi bar. It was like how most wives get annoyed with their husband's fixation on sports. I care not a wit about sports. Who wins or loses a game can not affect the future of the world. It can not result in installing a leader who believes climate change is a Chinese hoax, one who will surely roll back every arduous step made to even the 99 to 1 percent score, one who will undo (if only for ego sake) everything his predecessor did.

It was the beginning of the Iowa caucuses, February 1. I was fifty-one-years-old that day, looking down that hill of chronological age. The ship I was on cut its moorings at 44PM. Shortly thereafter I would have to find muster station “C” that was mapped on or door. Soon I left the room with my dark orange life-vest slung over my shoulder. A sea of passengers waited by the elevators, many carrying drinks, women in low-rise bikinis, lumpy women with sun-burned bossoms squeezed out of one-piece bathing suits. There were middle-age men, pie-eyed, with ray-ban sun glasses hanging from their necks. They were the southern spoken blue-collars, red, purple necks for whom an ego monolith like Trump would really appeal. They toed their penny saved vacation with flip-flops, with mesh baseball hats turned around, with the buckets of beer one could buy, they were the ones who knew Trump was their savior.

I was on a ship of fools. If they knew now what I knew then a woman would be calling the shots. I began supporting Bernie Sanders. My wife and I paid our 27$ to be part of his grass-roots campaign. We have our “feel the Bern” coffee mugs. He spoke his stump he was speaking in 1983—word for word. I thought he was Gene McCarthy, Paul Wellstone, maybe even a whiter MLK. He knew what it took to narrow the gap, to make the system work. He was the curmudgeonly Independent Vermont senator who came out of the chambers one day and sounded “Enough is enough.” Enough corruption, Wall Street, citizens united, haphazard gun sales, slush funds, shooting unarmed citizens, and ignoring the jobs that could be created by heeding climate change.

I came back to my state room. I passed the muster and felt confident I''d know what to do on a sinking ship. Sanders was ahead of Hillary. Trump was leading his pack. It is a human impulsion to draw comparisons. I saw something shaping up. In 2016 my look at the seminal Democratic contest in 1968 in my book Ten Years and Change: Growing up Democratic was back-shadowed. That tumult of Americana's worst modern fits of growing pains filtered through the crack in the ship. I saw Hillary Clinton as the Hubert Humphrey character, the potentially good guy—or gal—who stays too close to the fire to be productive, to be believable, to gain the trust of a class of economically challenged people who always got left behind. It was reported by Chris Mathews, the Hardball who is a sledgehammer, a steamroller, barely letting his subjects refute themselves, that Sanders early lead was reminiscent of the McCarthy upset in New Hampshire 48 years prior. The margin challenging numbers that had made LBJ check his watch, the Minnesota nice dark horse that put ideas in RFK's head. It wasn't—not by a long shot—exactly the same. The two races had their similarities, their lines of convergence, their lessons that get taught over and over while America fearlessly sails on like a Mayflower morning its loss.