Reflections on an un-conventionally conventional summer

Did you hear the one about the DNC apologizing to Bernie Sanders for torpedoeing his entire campaign “remarks made over email”?

It had to be a joke because they said, “These comments do not reflect the values of the DNC or our steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process.”

Laugh a minute, those DNC flaks. ‘Cause you know, when your chairthing and everybody else spends months plotting the demise of one candidate and the accession of another, it’s pretty obvious your steadfast commitment … isn’t.

But what the heck. Words don’t actually have to mean anything these days. And I’m sure all the bad things happened because “mistakes were made” and everybody now sincerely regrets “giving the appearance of wrongdoing.”

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It’s refreshing to see that the Dems’ convention opened in utter chaos. Keeping up with the Republicans in great style.

Do you realize how enormously, freakin’ patient we Americans are that we’re not already plotting revolution?

Watching the political establishment, left and right, totally self-destruct before our very eyeballs is a much better way to go. Or would be if we didn’t have a long, long road of self-destruction still ahead, and an uncertain outcome beyond.

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During the Arab Spring in 2011, I wrote an article for S.W.A.T. called “The Trouble With Revolutions.”

I don’t think they put that one online. I might see if I can get them to make it available or give me permission to post my .doc version. It predicted a bad end for the Arab Spring based on the long history of other such hopeful populist movements.

Basically, it said, though there are plenty of complications, the people who end revolutions (peaceful or otherwise) aren’t the people who start them.

The people who start them are rarely ever capable of even attempting to govern in the aftermath, but the question is usually moot because somewhere along the line some “leader” will end up announcing that the official language of the banana republic is now Swedish. And all the related joys that go with that sort of thing.

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While hardly revolutionary, both The Donald and The Hillary show inclinations to be that kind of leader. I don’t know which is more terrifying: the sly old hand who knows how to get everything done to her benefit or the megalomaniacal brat who expects to get his way on sheer force alone. He, at least, is likely to flatten himself, Wile E. Coyote style, against a wall of “the way things are done in Washington.” That’s good. Her aspirations are more modest, but she’s likely to get more of her agenda enforced.

But both of them have built up these weird followings — these crowds of glassy-eyed acolytes, these brownshirts who refuse to tolerate a hint of dissent, these True Believers who know that, despite all the evidence, their candidate is going to deliver what they expect.

Authoritarian left-winger Trump is surrounded by all these right-wing and libertarian types who’ve convinced themselves against all reality that the Manhattan private-schoolboy billionaire wants just what they want.

Corporate left-winger Hillary is surrounded by all these blacks, Hispanics, and women who believe she’s going to be their champion — when the only person she’s championing is herself.

Clinton’s acolytes are more understandable. For one, she really does play heavily to them, and for two, the have reason to view her as their only possible electoral salvation.

But Trump’s enthusiastic followers are … incomprehensible.

I mean, sure. V*te for the man if you think Hillary’s the second coming of Cruella DeVil. I’ve said it before: I don’t care. After all, some of Hillary’s v*ters are supporting her because they think Trump’s the second coming of Benito Mussolini.

But don’t delude yourself about who or what Trump is. His own words, his own contributions, his own decades of personal actions and political stances give the lie to anyone’s grand illusions about him.

Yet none of this incomprehensible enthusiasm for Trump is anything new.

This is just the way it works when masses of people get desperate. Read any history of any uprising ever and at some point you’ll find people throwing their lives and hopes behind someone who manifestly will betray them.

Throughout history, mobs create the person they want to fulfill their hopes. Then they drape that illusion over whatever real-live wannabe leader is standing there. Later … they pay.

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Never comes to a good end, that. Never.

But until (and alas, unless) some large minority is willing not only to be self-governors but to understand the why of self-governing, history is going to rhyme as interminably as an epic poem written by a subcommittee of bureaucrats appointed by a committee made up of Robespierre, Alexander Hamilton, Lenin, the Ayatollah Komeini, Oliver Cromwell, and Gen. Emilio Molina Vargas.