The Cruelty of the Spotlight

Dearest Rachel –

As much as I am loathe to, even as it feels like it’s unavoidable, I guess it’s appropriate, on this day of all days, for me to talk about politics. It is, after baseball, the national pastime, especially every four years – which is where we are now. We aren’t as physically vicious as the ancient Romans, with the gladiatorial combats and wild animals tearing Christians and other dissenters apart, but we have our own form of blood sport in this realm, where careers are made and lost in front of the masses, sometimes with little more than a single turn of phrase. If the fate of our nation – and, by extension, the world – didn’t always hang in the balance, it would be quite entertaining (and honestly, that knowledge can be surprisingly easy to relegate to the corner of one’s mind while watching the combatants savage each other in their quest for office).

Now, you never had to sit through any of this current administration – although you called me up at the ‘office’ a mere couple weeks before it started: “are you seeing what’s going on at the Capitol?” – apart from the first handful of days before your departure. To be honest, I see no reason to fill you in on what’s gone on since then; if you can’t see any of it from your vantage point, you’re probably better off. There are other, more important things to focus on than the nattering of a single nation upon a tiny rock spinning around an insignificant star on the edges of just one of a near-infinite cluster of galaxies.

Still, in the week since the first of what is supposed to be a pair of debates between the last two men left standing in the runup to this particular election – both of whom are known quantities, in a scenario that hasn’t happened for well over a century – there have been a number of interesting developments, and I can’t help but comment upon them, since they strike me as particularly strange. Not that I have a problem with them; it’s just that this out-of-character behavior is notable.

The current challenger, as you’ll recall, is a massive, almost raging egotist. He could be described, as Lincoln did his secretary of the Treasury, as “a good man, but whose theology is flawed; he thinks there is a fourth member of the Trinity.” Others might likewise describe him as (and I’ve no idea who came up with this first, not who it was applied to, so I will refrain from attribution) “a self-made man who worships his creator.” It’s a large part of why neither of us, despite traditionally voting for those under the party banner he ran with, could not bring ourselves to vote for him the first time he ran. It didn’t help that, while he didn’t appear to be a particularly political man himself up until then, he had previously hung out with the power brokers from the opposite party for most of his public life. To be sure, when you do business in a city, you do business with the ruling class of that city, regardless of party affiliation (money is neither blue nor red, but green, after all), but as a neophyte politician, we assumed he would be little more than a Trojan horse for the party we tended to vote against. As a result, we simply wrote in candidates for the position, while casting our ballot for downballot races – most of whom lost anyway, as we live so close to another city that is also a wholly-owned subsidiary of that same party we oppose.

We were pleasantly surprised, however, first of all, by the fact that he actually won, but then by the fact that not only did he embrace the principles of our party, but in fact did so to an extent that hadn’t been seen in over a generation. What reluctance we’d had was swept away by the results his administration produced. To be sure, he continued to boast about his accomplishments in a manner that bordered on the unseemly, but they seemed more justified than before, and we were happy to grant him a mandate to continue with his policies, even as he felt he had to run counter to them in the teeth of the once-in-a-century black swan event that was the pandemic.

It was, however, once again a futile gesture. Well, it always will be in this county (and by extension, the state, as this county drags the rest of the state along, kicking and screaming, regardless of whether those not living in the city want to go along with it or not), but even more so for country at large. Despite a few stories breaking near the tail end of the campaign that would have been damaging to him had they been widely disseminated, his opponent and his team managed to suppress them, claiming they were lies of one variety or another, and captured the office. Those stories have since been, almost to the last, been proven true; any claims of a ‘stolen’ election may be spurious, but the suppression of the damaging information no doubt would have affected more than enough voters to sway the results in the opposite direction.

Ironically, while the national Fourth Estate have made absolutely no secret of their disdain for the man they helped depose – and no mistake, by going along with the opposing party to cover up or even outright deny certain damaging stories that turned out to be perfectly true, they did, in fact, help him to be voted out – they gave the man they clearly hated an extra four years in the spotlight. By now, they would practically be rid of him had they let things play out, as he would be on the verge of being term-limited. But they thought that, by putting their thumb on the scale, and constantly vilifying him – to the point of prosecution for offenses that normally went unpunished were they committed by anyone else – they could get rid of him that much sooner.

All of which turned out to be a terrible plan. Given his personality from years and decades past, it should have been known that all this ink (whether physical or digital) spilled over him was akin to throwing Br’er Rabbit into the briar patch. The man consumed publicity the way most of us gulp down oxygen, and you might be aware of the axiom about how bad publicity isn’t a thing. Indeed, to many people, the ‘bad’ publicity simply appeared to be a case (or rather, many cases) of him being attacked by people who the masses saw as being worse than he was. Sure, he was a raging egotist, but the people going after him appeared to be power-hungry control freaks who were terrified of his influence – and who, by persecuting him, accomplished the nigh-impossible task of casting him as an underdog, a “one man against the System” despite having been at the top of said System (although it could be argued that he spent much of his time there riding it like a bucking bronco, with it desperately trying to shake him off).

And yet, at this moment, when it seems like he might be able to make a comeback and return to take the reigns back again… he has gone uncharacteristically silent. Those who know him know it won’t last, and perhaps by the time you get this letter, he will have broken his silence. It wouldn’t surprise me. But for some reason, he has decided not to try and direct the spotlight upon himself, despite the fact that it’s clearly not on him, but on his opponent; the man who defeated him, the man who – ostensibly – is in power. Of course, the reason he isn’t clamoring for the spotlight becomes clear as you find out what it has been revealing over the past week.

Ours is an age of high-definition, honey. We have cameras and televisions that pick up every pore, every blemish, if we should so desire. Every flaw, every foible can be captured for the world to see. Now, we also have make-up art, editing and post-production capabilities that can render the homeliest of humans into a god or goddess to rival Adonis or Aphrodite themselves, as well. But those can’t necessarily be utilized live and in real time; and it was in real time last week that we got to see the true cruelty of the spotlight. The System’s champion, the supposed leader of the Free World, was shown to be a doddering old man on the verge of senescence, incapable of stringing together a handful of coherent words, let alone full thoughts.

Now, there have been those who have been saying such about him since his ascension; but in fairness, this could be dismissed. I still recall the hue and cry about Reagan’s creeping dementia when he was in office (which he did, in fact, ultimately come down with and die from, but that didn’t happen until years after the turn of the millennium, when it was no longer an issue), so such accusations are hardly without precedent, and could be construed as equally unfounded at the time. Indeed, less than a week before the debate, we the people were being told that the footage we were seeing of the man wandering off (both physically and verbally), tripping over the slightest things, and generally displaying symptoms of dementia, were all hoaxes to be ignored: “cheap fakes,” they were called, in an odd twist on the current trend of digitally-generated “deepfakes” that can be created to essentially show literally anyone saying anything these days (although those are still barely sophisticated enough to show a person speaking at a platform – and even then, there’s still a jerky, Max Headroom-style look to them. Actual motion, while maybe not all that far off, given the march of technology, isn’t here yet).

But on the stage, it was no longer deniable. This man, this great Champion of Democracy, was not who we had been told he was or is – and quite possibly never has been. And the longer the spotlight is on him, the more the façade melts and peels away. Meanwhile, the challenger, the one who lives on publicity, has decided that the cruelty of the spotlight is – for the moment, at least – not for him, no matter how much he ordinarily would long for it. Right now, that light is a blistering, searing fire that burns away all semblance of appeal from his opponent, the erstwhile Defender of Democracy, much like what we’re told we might expect from the bema seat judgement of our own future experience prior to entering the New Jerusalem. Only in this case, the process may well result in his expulsion from the supposed Promised Land that we’ve tried to build here on earth in this country. A more righteous man, one who hadn’t spent so much time and effort to conceal himself and who he really was, wouldn’t have so much to burn away, but there you are. He did, and he has.

Of course, the truly infuriating thing is that he couldn’t have done it alone. As I said, the Fourth Estate wanted him there and did their level best to assist him in covering up every flaw, every foible. There were those pointing out the emperor’s ugly nudity, but they were dismissed as cranks and extremists. Even now, I’ve seen think pieces that suggest that the media would have looked into these issues sooner, had they not been espoused by certain people on the very fringes of the media ecosystem, who by dint of their not being a part of the inner circle of the industry, were automatically suspect. Incredible, literally.

But, it would seem that the very spotlight they wield is finally uncovering the truth, as hard as they have tried to prevent it. To be sure, there is much handwringing going on; “how could we have missed this for so long?” Perhaps they wanted to disbelieve what was before their eyes, though I can’t fathom why. What do they think is going to happen this time around that would be different – and presumably, worse – than the first time he had the reigns? Vengeance? Why, pray tell, would the man seek vengeance? Did you folks happen to do something that would prompt him to do so?

Such is, on this day we celebrate our nation’s birthday (not that there aren’t certain people who seem to find nothing worth celebrating about it; you’d think, with nearly two hundred other to choose from, they might resettle elsewhere. I can think of a few that might be worth looking into, even from my own experience and taste), its current state, at least as far as who might be running it in another six months or so. It may be the status quo; it may be restored to the status quo ante. I obviously have my preferences, and while I’ve tried not to name names, I trust you can divine who is who in all this. It’s not something I like to dwell upon, but it seems unavoidable, in a day and age where one’s politics defines one as much as so many other characteristics, and either allows you entrance or shuts you out from so much.

And yet, at the end, it’s all meaningless. We take none of our money or possessions with us when we join you; those who try only get their graves plundered by thieves and archeologists. The things we do to obtain them can destroy us, and if we put too much trust in them rather than the One who allows us to have them for a time, we may find ourselves shut out of the one place that really matters. But that’s a choice I can only control for myself; everyone else is free to make their own decisions, for good or ill. That’s what liberty is all about. God does not bless America; He blesses us Americans when and if we choose to accept His blessings. May He bless us, yes, but may we turn to Him for blessing first.

And with that, I apologize for such a long, rambly letter. I know this stuff is of no concern to you (save, perhaps, that it’s happening to your son and husband), but regardless, keep an eye on us, and wish us luck, as we’re clearly going to need it.