The Story We're Not Hearing Today

FOTP Monday

Donald Trump should not have been the story.

Today's news was supposed to be about how a country found its way home, how a country that had flirted with fascism rejected such a descent, and how a country that was becoming increasingly incurious and cruel and religiously arrogant would be instead celebrating a return to light. How could it not? We were smarter, better than that. Weren’t we? How could the increase in the price of cream cheese trump, you should pardon the expression, the safety of Europe? How could the mischaracterization and bastardization of the notion of inclusion and equity, the concocted danger of transgender field hockey players, the embrace of proud, palpable bigotry, and the fascination with international despots and murderers be rewarded? Certainly, Americans would listen to their better angels, and if not those angels, then at least the sane, practical ones who didn’t want to conquer Greenland and allow pregnant women to die in hospital parking lots because doctors and hospitals refused to remove their dead fetuses from their rupturing fallopian tubes? The narrative, the hope, was that today, the day we inaugurated the 47th president of the United States, would be one in which we would save ourselves from ourselves. While Trumpism would still be with us, the thinking went, Donald Trump would not be standing at a podium with one hand on a bible and one in the air, taking the presidential oath of office — and there would be the victory.

But he is.

That is the story today. He is.

There was supposed to be another one. How could there not be on the day we celebrate Martin Luther King? The poetry was too perfect.

This one . . .