Dear Luv Doc,
I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, because I like to imagine you live in an underground bunker with pink shag carpeting, a heart-shaped waterbed, a 50-gallon industrial drum of Astroglide, and a mini-fridge stocked with nothing but bottles of Cristal and poppers, but Donald Trump actually won the election and everyone is totally freaking the fuck out. Where do we go from here? Canada?
– A. Millennial
Back when I was a little wetter behind the ears there was this down-on-his-luck, coke-swilling rich kid from the Phillips Academy who, after failing at several business ventures, decided to try his hand at government. Although he was far from the brightest bulb on the tree, he somehow managed to get into Yale University – which was puzzling considering he couldn’t pronounce the word “nuclear.” And he nearly choked to death on a pretzel, but as ashamed as I am to admit it … in his own “words,” we “misunderestimated” him.
Boy, did we ever. This C-average cheerleader became not only the president of the United States of America … he did it twice, and also became a celebrated below-average watercolor painter in his later years. In between, he managed to talk 220 or so million of us into avenging his father’s failures as a timid warrior by killing several hundred thousand Iraqis and nearly five thousand U.S. soldiers – and he was the nice incompetent president.
Now, you may think that the moral to this story is that any trust fund kid with a coke habit can ruin America’s standing in the world if he just sets his mind to it, but it’s not that simple. He also needs a chip on his shoulder, some sort of psychotic animus that drives him to succeed when by most any other measurement, he already has. If you’re going to mass-murder people, you need to have some fire in your belly, even if it was lit in the dull furnace of an underdeveloped mind.
Anyone old enough to be reading this in print has already had their sense of fundamental decency shaken to the core by one or more presidential elections, each one promising at its outset to be the coming of the Antichrist, and while no one has actually shaven his orange toupee and revealed a 666, my bet is that this president, too, will fall well short of that mark. Is he an odious, repugnant human being? By any objective measure, yes. Does he have the chutzpah to bring on the apocalypse? Doubt it. He’ll be lucky to overturn Obamacare.
So … move to Canada? I mean, they make some decent whiskey and their P.M.’s a doll, but for nine months of the year it’s so cold you can cut diamonds with your nipples and for the other three it’s sweater weather. My advice is to stay here and nurture your rage and incredulity. Just because you choose to stay in the sunshine doesn’t make you a sunshine patriot. Go out and wage unremitting war on ignorance and intolerance. The battle begins January 20.
This article appears in November 18 • 2016.
