I find it remarkable (thus do I remark) that, after three days of faraway orbital bliss, my reentry into the miasmic atmosphere of American politics would prompt first a remembrance of the British poet Philip Larkin: namely, his elegiac reflection that "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you."
What does Larkin's oft-quoted quatrain of personal melancholy have to do with the circus of American politics, presently defined as the performance artistry of eccentric pachyderms? Quoting again, I thank Paul Krugman for making my mental connection: "You might have expected the debacle of George W. Bush’s presidency … to inspire some reconsideration of W-type policies. What we’ve seen instead is a doubling down, a determination to take whatever didn’t work from 2001 to 2008 and do it again, in a more extreme form."
They, the mums and dads — the fault-laden W.s and Gingriches and Reagans — fucked the conservative children up but good, and the latter have only added some extra absurdities. Krugman surveys the genealogical decline; he marvels at the Republican presidential candidates who "are proposing much bigger tax cuts than W ever did," he is aghast at the candidates who "have declared their determination to repeal Dodd-Frank," and he is somewhat stunned at the near universality of these pols' "swagger-and-bomb posturing."
Yet Krugman's survey is merely a primer, in that it goes not far enough. For authentic enough-is-enough-ness, one must read Michael Grunwald's appalled sketch of second-generational ideological decrepitude. Writing in Politico Magazine, Grunwald reminds us, for instance, that Carly Fiorina has noted that "the minimum wage is unconstitutional"; that Mike Huckabee has promised to "defy Supreme Court rulings he deems incompatible with God’s law"; that Ted Cruz has "called for putting the United States back on the gold standard"; and that Booby Jindal was once gleefully determined to "sic the IRS and the Justice Department on Planned Parenthood on his first day as president — basically, an impeachable crime." The "establishment" candidates' bizarre peculiarities are also noted by Grunwald; and then, of course, there is Donald Trump, who requires no comment.
And we thought mum and dad were nuts.
In summation, as the lawyers say, the poet Larkin offers, in his third and last quatrain, a Frostian road tragically not taken by today's Republican brood: "Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf. / Get out as early as you can, / And don't have any kids yourself."
It is fair of us to conclude, I think, that Daddy Trump has now sired the third — and final — generation.