On January 20th, 2017, we were in Sarasota, FL. It was a social visit, so we were trying to pay more attention to the live people in front of us than to the TV in the next room. But we couldn’t help ourselves and our attention kept drifting to the screen. It didn’t seem real. It didn’t seem possible that this two-bit reality TV snake oil demagogue was being inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States of America. We shared a certain embarrassment as we noted the awkward distance between the new President and his First Lady, the first woman ever to occupy that office who can include among her credentials the fact that she was once a porn star. We shared, too, a certain sense of grief as we watched a tearful Michelle Obama do her best to maintain composure during the formalities. While her husband held a stony equanimity, she didn’t share his skill at hiding personal feelings. As an insider, she probably knew better than most what was coming.
A curious thing about our lunch is that one of our fellow munching TV-watchers has the distinction of being Donald Trump’s first cousin. He traces his relationship to Trump through the maternal line (i.e. the line without the sociopath gene) and it shows. He is a warm and generous person, highly intelligent (a retired professor of mathematics), deeply committed to his faith, a man of unshakeable integrity. It is a matter of mild embarrassment, then, that he and an insecure narcissist with access to the world’s largest nuclear arsenal should share a set of grandparents.
After our lunch and some more TV gawking, we went to Sarasota’s art museum. The grounds are sprawling and quiet, the perfect place to still the mind. And yet these buildings filled with, among other things, paintings from the high renaissance are called The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, a cultural destination built upon the private collection of a man who made his fortune operating a circus. It would be wrong to describe this as a portentous association. It’s an association—high and low, art and circus, deep history and empty afternoons in front of the TV—that is baked into the American psyche. Why should the country’s highest office be immune from that tendency to mashup the noble and the crass? It was odd to travel through a red state at that particular moment in history. In fact, the western shore of Florida was experiencing a red tide and people with respiratory issues complained that it was difficult to breathe. No kidding.
