October 1, 2020: Debate Sickness -

[Breaking: While I was posting this, I got the news that POTUS and FLOTUS have tested positive for COVID. I'm posting it nonetheless, even though maybe there won't be a second debate, and in fact, many things are up in the air.]  

Yesterday felt like an avalanche of think pieces on my feed. I was nearly thunk-out by the time I got through half of them. Most were excellent, but no amount of thinking could pull me out of my post-Presidential-debate pit.  I tried exercise, and painting, and ice cream, and admiring the natural world, but I felt unwell. Not COVID unwell, or smoke unwell, but soiled in my soul, degraded, emotionally abused by a bully (lots of women felt that abuser vibe, not just me). That bully was Trump.

The pontification and ranting continued today. People were successfully naming about eighty per cent of what I felt, and they were suggesting fixes for the next debate (I do not believe that “format” is the problem), and they were framing things philosophically:  don’t wrestle with a pig, don’t play chess with a pigeon, Trump is a known norm-breaker. Yes, true. All of that bothers me, and yet, there’s MORE.

These tidbits gave me fleeting relief:

I.

George Will threw a hissy fit.  I didn’t agree with most of what George had to say, but the man can rant, and his intro was priceless.

“The putrescence of America’s public life was pitilessly displayed Tuesday when, for 98 minutes, whatever remains of the nation’s domestic confidence and international stature shriveled like a brittle autumn leaf. The national interest — actually, national security — demands that the other two scheduled mortifications, fraudulently advertised as presidential debates, should be canceled: When a nation makes itself pathetic, the response of enemy nations is not sympathy.”

Enemy nations may not feel sympathy, but I’ll tell you this – I attended a Zoom class last night that is about half Canadians, and they went right past sympathy to pity.  They of course apologized for pitying us, and tried to crack some jokes, but it was grim. I’ve been pitied by Brits in my career, and I can take it. And I’m not saying the Canadians didn’t have cause. But they were just so stinking nice about it. 

(For the record, none of them criticized Biden, nor am I criticizing him. It was all horror about Trump.)

II.

The guys on Pod Save America gave a debate recap where they made the case that in 2016, Trump portrayed himself as brash and rule-breaking and therefore “authentic,” exposing the “corrupt” elites and those horrible, politically-correct libs. In the debate on Tuesday, though, his offensiveness didn’t serve anyone. It didn’t advance the interests of his base for him to diss Beau Biden and pick on Hunter Biden’s struggle with addiction. It wasn’t about speaking truth to power. It was just being a jerk.

It cheered me briefly to hear them say that the nastiness wasn’t performing the same function it did four years ago. And I liked the way they analyzed the debate. My discomfort, though, wasn’t settled by their repeatedly saying that Trump had acted like a lunatic. I do freak out when people act crazy, alas, but I could tell that my sickened response to the debates wasn’t some version of that familiar freak-out.  It was something else.

III.

A friend sent a years-old clip of linguist John McWhorter analyzing Trump’s style of speech.

The headline to this video is misleading but the interview itself is great, and McWhorter is nearly as much fun as George Will, calling Trump linguistically “unadorned,” saying he takes a “rather narcotic joy in dismissal and belittlement.”  McWhorter’s main point is that Trump uses casual speech in situations where most of us would use formal speech. I don’t want to spoil the fun for you, if you are going to watch it, but my favorite line was, “He simply has no deodorant-wearing Sunday best way of speaking, and that includes that you have to have a more responsible sense of truth than when you are just BS’ing with your pals.”

What spoke to me was the “deodorant” comment. It rang a bell, foreshadowing George Will’s “putrescence.” Trump’s behavior STINKS. The discomfort I was enduring had a name, and it was Disgust. AHA.

Volumes have been written about disgust, and its importance as one of the most powerful of human emotions, right up there with shame and terror. I don’t feel it very often, or rather, when I do feel it, I try to escape fast. (I can wallow in shame with the best of them, for ages, and my ability to freak out in terror is, I would say, fair, but with disgust, I zoom away.) 

I think what happened Tuesday night was that I turned the debate off as a waste of my time and an agitation of my soul, and then I saw somebody post something about it, so I turned it back on, then decided to turn it off again, but each time, before I could, Trump would do or say something so appalling that I’d wait to see what would happen next. So I ended up getting a great big dose of disgust at once – a stomach full of racism, boorishness, voter intimidation, election wrecking, violence-inciting, progeny-insulting, and flat out lying. It was annoying and upsetting, yes, but for me, it was actually physically sickening.

So. That's what a big dose of disgust feels like: it's stomach-turning. 

Good to know. 

I feel better today. I am begging my loved ones to lash me to the mast and keep me from watching the next debate. I can probably handle the highlights reel. Maybe not. We shall see.

(Update: Apparently this post didn't sound sufficiently 

PLEASE VOTE BIDEN/HARRIS 

to at least one reader, so I've added some explicit bits. Even more explicit bits are in "Let's Get Explicit," October 4.)