Sunday, October 16, 2016
California Zephyr, Donner Summit
They way one political landscape belittles another. Trump’s campaign is walking around in his shorts. The shorts are down to his ankles. He trips over and over again as one woman after another gives graphic account of“the groper”. Assume there is terror in what is left of his heart. He cannot admit defeat. He keeps broadcasting the election is rigged. He implies that his supporters will take their long guns and surround voting sites. They will terrify the electorate into not showing up, to not vote. It’s all wickedly stupid. The polls show he has not chance. Hi so degrading of himself, of the process. He us a crazy man in a crazy country which has given him up until now the permission to go publicly crazy.
It’s hard to not feel ashamed. Ashamed that he has been able to go this far. That as a country, as a people that we have let it go this far.
In the Observation Car one man strums his Mandolin into familiar melodies. He edits books for the blind. “No”, he says, “I don’t read braille. It is really hard. You have to learn very young. If you are good, I have seen a person’s fingers play back and forth across a page like it was an instrument and understanding everything that was there.”
I want to imagine the leader of this country as comparable to that person reading braille.
