Living In A Surreal Time

As a child, it seemed living through history was a missed opportunity. This then-adolescent looks back at Watergate with envy. The Iran Contra Affair’s significance didn’t strike me at the time. Although its hearing kept me riveted. Despite his actions, which this then 9-year-old didn’t comprehend, Col. Oliver North intrigued me. I was a young and a repressed gay boy. Do the math. With all that said, Watergate still loomed large.

The Watergate obsession and an apparent gift for stringing together words led me to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s College of Communications (now College of Media). Discovering Deepthroat’s identity, under the late Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist William Gaines’ guidance, was my academic pursuit in his Investigative Journalism class.

Gaines pegged Nixon Deputy White House Counsel Fred Fielding to use specific criteria, including whether they smoked or what they drank. However, this aspiring reporter had a hunch that the late W. Mark Felt, Nixon’s U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) associate director, was the right choice. Claiming my accuracy deserves no pats on the back. The 21st Century’s Deepthroat’s emergence is vital.

Whoever wrote the anonymous New York Times op-ed needs to come forward. Telling us a small band of resistors have America’s back isn’t reassuring. While most Americans may not have voted for Donald J. Trump, the electoral college didn’t secure this band’s election. It secured Trump the White House. The author’s (or authors’) assurances that adults are in the room ring hollow.

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The result is a two-track presidency. New York Times

Adults in the room, who put children in cages, don’t make Americans with consciences and morals comfortable. Adults in the room, who believe people of color are inferior, don’t make Americans with consciences and morals comfortable. Adults in the room who believe in inflicting theological terrorism on LGBTQIA people, don’t make Americans with consciences and morals comfortable.

The adults in the room, who’ve reduced the President to a figurehead, don’t make Americans with consciences and morals comfortable. That’s not how the United States government is supposed to work. The author and author’s commitment to the President’s agenda is laughable. The 25th Amendment remedy was being discussed a month into the Trump presidency. This is no longer his agenda — if it ever was. It belongs to this alleged band of resistors.

These people, whoever they are, attempt to paint themselves as patriots trying to save America. In truth, they’re drunk with power and justifying their existence as members of a theocratic and xenophobic Deep Red State. They’ve used theocracy and xenophobia to harness the queerphobia, racism and false victimhood of its base to further THEIR — not Trump’s — agenda.