Back from retreat

I had the week off -- the university was closed -- and I suppose I could have spent it madly blogging but instead I wound up contemplating. It has been difficult for me this past year to keep up a blog that's supposed to be about public health when the sorts of subjects I might write about from the standpoint of my expertise are overwhelmed in importance by the crisis facing our democratic polity. And that is also a crisis facing all of humanity.

Ezra Klein describes the evident derangement of the person who 47% of the electorate thought should be president, and Charlie Pierce piles on. But it is not his dementia, or even his ignorance and narcissism that disturbs me the most, it is his moral depravity. The discovery that a large percentage of the electorate is actually attracted to bullying, racism, sexism, stupidity and vulgarity  was unnerving. What is even more unnerving is that these people are impervious to reality. Facts and logic don't matter to them, just the angry, obnoxious style. Here's Politico's Michael Kruse visiting Johnstown.  He interviews one voter who agrees that Trump hasn't actually kept any of his promises, but it doesn't matter to him:

Del Signore is by his own admission not a person who’s focused on policy specifics. . . . The 61-year-old Johnstown native proudly planted a Trump sign in the ground in front of his catering company. And nothing that’s happened in the past 12 months, he told me when we met for lunch on Italian buffet day at the Holiday Inn, has lessened his enthusiasm for the man who so energized him.

“Everybody I talk to,” he said, “realizes it’s not Trump who’s dragging his feet. Trump’s probably the most diligent, hardest-working president we’ve ever had in our lifetimes. It’s not like he sleeps in till noon and goes golfing every weekend, like the last president did.” I stopped him, informing him that, yes, Barack Obama liked to golf, but Trump in fact does golf a lot, too—more, in fact. Del Signore was surprised to hear this. “Does he?” he said. “Yes,” I said. He did not linger on this topic, smiling and changing the subject with a quip. “If I was married to his wife,” Del Signore said, “I don’t think I’d go anywhere.” . . .

A Catholic whose wife goes to church every Sunday, whereas he, “shame on me,” does not, Del Signore told me toward the end of our lunch that some people at church told his wife that Obama is the antichrist. “She comes home and tells me these things that they tell you in church,” he said. I asked him whether that’s what he thinks. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some people say that.” If Obama, I asked, is the antichrist—whose arrival is said to precede the second coming of Christ—what would that make Trump? “The savior?” Del Signore suggested.

Here's Digby on the delusionality of the Trump "base":

Nearly half of registered Republicans believe Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign is implicated in a satanic child abuse ring operated from beneath a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, according to the results of a new poll released this week. . . .Basically, most Republicans based upon zero evidence, believe that President Barack Obama was a Muslim plant, probably a terrorist and that Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee for president and former Secretary of State, is a child sex trafficking pedophile. But the Russia investigation, headed by the former director of the FBI and endorsed by every Intelligence Official free to speak on the record, is a hoax.

Equally as disturbing is the decision of the Republicans in congress to circle the wagons, and try to undermine the FBI investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. This is treason. And for the sake of what? Holding on to the idiot vote so their rich donors don't have to pay taxes and are free to pollute the environment, defraud consumers, and exploit their workers.

Under the circumstances I often despair of sitting down and typing out true facts based on evidence and reason. But that's all I know how to do.