Alternation

Sitting on a sofa

On a Sunday afternoon

Going to the candidates' debate

Laugh about itShout about itWhen you've got to choose

Every way you look at it you lose

Written by Paul Simon • Copyright © Universal Music Publishing Group

What I think that we are seeing here in the US is the same sad lesson taught by the history that we so assiduously ignore, that we don't think applies to us, because we are different and special.

Power alternates.  The wise that manage the growth and the power that causes a country to rise get tired and neglect that which makes them strong.  I'm not talking about the military, or the strength of so-called "financial Institutions", but the process of strengthening the people that make up the country.  All of them.

When those wise men (Washington, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, Eisenhower) pass out of the gates of power, they are usually followed by those who are less wise, often evil, and who are preoccupied with gaining power at all costs.

Look, Donald Trump is the candidate of a party that has long since discarded the pretense of caring about the rank and file of this country.  He is a flim-flam man of the highest order, and has a history of failures.  He is a rich boy, having gotten his start through the mechanism of a "small loan" of a million dollars from his family back in the seventies.  All that being said he has no driving need to be President, it almost seems that he is doing so out of a sense of duty, because things have gotten so damn bad that something has to be done.

But he is an old man, who is inexorably wedded to the flamboyant and shallow.  An aging icon who sees a imagined past golden age and wants to return us to that illusion.

Hillary is the apotheosis of ambition without conscience.  She cares nothing for the common man, even though she represents the party of the same.  Her "base" is the rich and unprincipled who have bought and sold her through the mechanism of her charity,  Her whole life is a construct, reaching for power and money any way she can.  

She is an old woman, whose ambition rides her and blinds her to anything but her own desires.  In a sense, she is the perfect figurehead for the boomers, the generation who brought the country to its knees.  

These are the two most likely candidates for the occupant of the presidency, an office that has been gradually losing its power and prestige for a over a generation now.