Many years ago, I remember thinking that Johnny Depp was going to get in serious trouble for something that he said.
What did he say?
He said that politics in the United States was like a dumb puppy. You could play with it, but you cannot take it seriously.
While I understood and even to some degree agreed with his overall point, I had assumed that there would be a massive backlash among millions of Americans, both to the left and to the right. If there is anything that unifies Americans, it is when someone is perceived to have disrespected the nation.
To my surprise, nothing happened. No backlash.
This was back during the days of George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. Of course, those were ridiculous times, and there was nothing more glaringly ridiculous at the time than the idea that the invasion of Iraq would be a good idea. It should have been obvious to pretty much everybody that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with September 11th. Likewise, it should have been even more obvious that Iraq posed no serious, much less immediate, threat to the United States. If, indeed, Saddam Hussein had access to the abilities that members of the Bush administration were clearly insinuating, such as that mushroom cloud over an American city, or 45-minute response time, Iraq would have qualified as a de facto superpower. Yet, the rosy predictions of a quick and decisive victory in Iraq which would take most likely somewhere between six days or six weeks, but would not take as long as six months, were themselves the most obvious refutations to how much of an immediate threat Iraq posed.
Nevertheless, we went to war, with a majority approving. Even worse, I remember a poll maybe a decade and change after the invasion had been launched, directed at millennials. It asked if, knowing what we know now, with how poorly the war went, and with the Weapons of Mass Destruction which were conspicuous in their absence, we still should have gone to war. A slight majority of the millennials polled expressed approval of the war, despite all of the transparent indications of the lies that were used to justify the war, as well as to how costly (in every sense) the war had proven to be, and how disastrous it has been to American foreign policy.
Again, Depp had a point when he mentioned that American politics was like playing with a dumb puppy. When we do not value our own power and supposed leadership status more than this, than we deserve to be viewed either as clowns at best, or as a major source of suspicion and staggering arrogance – the collective “Ugly Americans” – at worst.
Yet, if anything, American politics has become even more of a joke. An action star was voted to be governor of California, and even though he proved to be better – quite a bit better, if I’m being perfectly honest – than I had assumed he would be, I still believe that he was elected mostly for the wrong reasons. Namely, that he was a good-looking Hollywood actor with a famous look and name and brand, not unlike Ronald Reagan, who many voted for because he seemed to epitomize the success story of the American Dream, and/or because he had a nice smile (yes, I have heard some people say that they like Reagan for that precise reason). It was not all that different than when in the 1960 election, people who had listened to the radio broadcast largely felt that Nixon had won. But those who had watched it on television, and contrasted the handsome young Kennedy versus the sweating and seemingly uncomfortable Nixon, felt that Kennedy had won, which helped Kennedy eventually win the White House.
Again, maybe this was good, or maybe it was bad. But it certainly was done for the wrong reasons.
Now, let us fast-forward to 2016. We have an established and all too polished politicians in Hillary Clinton against a billionaire city slicker who clearly considers himself a star in Donald Trump. Both candidates had well-established histories of lying. With Trump, the list of lies is too exhaustive to even begin to approach some kind of a list here. With Clinton, the lies ranged from having been shot at in the former Yugoslavia to a suspicious meeting between former President Bill Clinton (who happens to be Hillary’s powerful husband) and the Attorney General (who happened to be investigating Hillary)just before all charges were dropped. Hillary had basically asked the Democratic leaders for help in defeating Bernie Sanders, and they provided her with that help. Both should have known better, because they are supposed to remain neutral. Finally, Hillary received a question that was to be asked during one of the debates by a fellow prominent Democrat. All of those things – and those were hardly the only lies that Hillary Clinton was accused of – were real things that actually happened, and which understandably cast a shadow over the question of integrity and honesty when it came to Hillary Clinton, as did her marriage to one of the slickest and most untrustworthy politicians in American history, the aforementioned Bill Clinton, who also famously lied and lied and lied during his prominent political career.
We all know what happened. Donald Trump rose to the White House, and spent a solid four years cementing his status as the worst president in American history, by far. He had promised to make Mexico pay for a border wall, which was a lie. He had promised to create a national healthcare system that would be affordable and would cover everyone, going so far as to suggest that it would be easy. Another lie. He said that in eight years, he would pay off the national debt. In his four years in office, he added more than 25 percent to the national debt. Most importantly, during his Oath of Office, he promised to defend the Constitution of the United States, but then did as much as he possibly could to attack and erode it. That was the biggest lie of all. He deserved to be booted out of office, but since he is obviously a liar, and has an inflated ego (in fact, he is a megalomaniac), he lied about how massive voter fraud as the only reason that he did not get another four years, all without offering a shred of proof to back up his absurd claims.
By now, we surely all know about the militant band of Trump loyalists who relied on violence to storm the Capitol building and try to intimidate their way into subverting democracy to keep Trump in the White House. Many of them refused under any and all circumstances to accept that Trump lost the election, and still do. I know a guy who still thought that Trump would remain in the Oval Office literally just days before Biden took the Oath of Office. He claims he was just trying to stay positive. To me, it seemed more like he was in serious denial, living in a delusional fantasy where Trump is some kind of American hero, instead of the most arrogant, entitled, selfish, and dishonest major politician that we have ever seen.
Many people expressed fatigue with our political realities following Trump, and hoped that his end (if it is indeed even over) would mark a turn for the better. For me, though, I still think we have not bottomed out just yet. Things apparently are not bad enough to begin to take American politics seriously, so the circus act continues.
The latest evidence of this is the recent news that Caitlyn Jenner will be running for California’s gubernatorial race.
Everyone knows who Jenner is, right? I don’t care about the status of being transgender. What really bothers me is that this is someone who is a Kardashian, and who apparently feels that a certain celebrity status entitled them to making a run for some kind of prominent political office. This is not the first member of the Kardashian Clown Clan to run, after all. Remember how Kanye West ran for the White House? Remember when he first suggested it before a crowd of people, he asked them in all seriousness why they were laughing, as if anybody could be criticized for taking this as a joke?
Well, as Reagan used to say, “Here we go again.”
Personally, I could go the rest of my life without hearing about any celebrity running for very high office, and that goes double for the damn Kardashians. Maybe if Americans would pay less attention to keeping up with the Kardashians and more attention to our politics, and find a way not to confuse entertainment with politics, we actually might be much better off as a country, and we could take ourselves more seriously, collectively, to boot.
Until that day, however. I still believe that things are going to get worse before they really get better. We have been declining towards this absurd state of affairs for a very long time now. Decades, if we are being honest.
And once again, although it pains me to admit it as an American, I think that it has to be conceded that Johnny Depp (obviously a celebrity himself) made a valid point.
American politics right now is a disgrace, a joke, apparently not meant to be taken seriously by anyone.
Least of all Americans themselves, it seems.
