Dialog Of The Deaf

Friday, June 27th. The first presidential debate is hyped as momentous, game changer, mano-a-mano, and decisive clash of the gladiators defending Good and Evil.

Will absence of a live audience and presence of a mute button throw the coifed and aggressive Donald off his game? Have his multiple convictions and ordeal of sitting still and silent for hours in courts brought on early dementia and the textured incapacity to speak in complete sentences and coherent paragraphs?

Will the absence of teleprompter and notes – and chemical enhancers? – bleach all animation from old Joe and leave a babbling, vacant, slit-eyed drooling dotard? Can he rise on the bubble of low expectations by remaining simply upright and awake for 90 minutes, a feat the MAGA machine has maintains impossible for this near-dead man walking?

Two things are true: there will be a surfeit of presidents and the contest will resemble a dialog of the deaf.

For only the third time in our history, two presidents will be on the same ballot. (In 1888, Cleveland  and Harrison completed, the former returning to beat the current president; 1912 Taft, Roosevelt and Wilson, Wilson the non-president win.)

The debate might earn the label of real debate if enlightened ideas were exchanged and verifiable facts encountered. Trump will insist this is the worst of times, Biden the best. Each will lob vile accusations at the other. The contest will resemble nothing so much as playing tennis with the net down. For neither man is a Demosthenes and the “facts” will be selected to seduce not educate the public. They will use statistics like a drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination.

Most of the audience will be there to revel in their own partisanship and choices already made. For the remainder, like an inability to not gawk at a freeway accident, the allure will be perverse, the chance to witness yet another squalid example of what passes for political discourse in 2024.