The race is down to the home stretch already and we are still gasping for breath trying to understand America’s mental landscape. Should we be commenting at all about an election that has nought to do with us when our own elections can be a worse parody of all the values that are supposed to go into the greatest democratic principle of being able to choose our leaders? However, considering the impact the election to the office of the most powerful man or woman in the world is likely to have on the rest of the world, it would be impossible to stay off this build-up to a November 8 crescendo.
The politics of hate is not an Indian invention even if it seems to go overboard here at major election time. And sometimes politicians don’t even need an election to go at each other’s throats.
Donald Trump, however, seems to have taken politics to an all-time low, leading to possible degrading of the American brand itself. To hear him say things about the body parts of women is bad enough, but more worrying is the fact that his supporters believe his behaviour was normal. And then there was the threat to jail Hillary Clinton in a debate, which his publicists tried to pass off as humour.
Do men boast of love conquests in such a bawdy style even in locker rooms, I wonder. Having been on the caravan in a high testosterone environment in an international sport like cricket for a couple of decades, I heard many stars speak of women, but none in my experience ever did so in such indecent terms as Trump did. Maybe, there is a distinct American tilt to this as we have heard the likes of Mike Tyson talk in a different tone, much like that of Trump. What the Republican candidate had to say in videotapes that came tumbling out of the multimedia cupboards would have filled the world with revulsion. How he expects nearly half the population to vote for him after displaying such vulgarity is anyone’s guess.
His boasts amounting to admitting to assaulting women sexually was the tipping point, which sent the polls tilting hugely in his opponent Hillary Clinton’s favour. Curiously, what he had said earlier when introducing polemical diatribes into political discourse suggesting the banning of Muslims from entering USA, about a federal judge of Mexican lineage sitting on his case, his idea of a Mexican Wall to keep the migrants out and a female reporter’s disability amounted to a sea change in the way presidential candidates went about canvassing votes in the past. Add to the mix, tonnes of invective on not only his opponent but also her husband and you have the picture of what a realty billionaire and reality show star has converted the bid for the White House into. His opponent as well as her husband and past president may be fair game in a no-holds barred race, but it is the language of the discourse that is particularly jarring.
The most curious part of this race to the neutral observer is the other candidate is not a universally loved person either. After her escapades with a private server handling official mails, she is mistrusted and also disliked by sections of the electorate. “Just because you don’t like diarrhoea doesn’t mean you have to like constipation,” quipped the Indian-American stand-up comedian Mitra on the Stephen Colbert show, perhaps encapsulating the great American dilemma of 2016.
If Hillary is several percentage points ahead in the poll now, she can thank her opponent for all his antics as well as his misogynistic ways, which somehow betray the values of the land of equal opportunity. Just how does anyone allow a campaign line like “Trump that bitch” as a slogan on T-shirts? They are not cocking a snook at her so much as ignoring all laws of decency if it fetches dividend in the ballot battle. The vote bank building opportunistic Indian politician comes through as a virtual innocent when compared to this bigot of unmatchable proportions.
So downhill has the nation itself seems to have gone with this campaign that regardless of the result – whether Hillary Clinton does the predictable now in cashing in on her lead and goes on to rule as the USA’s first woman president or Donald Trump does the unthinkable in overturning such a tide of opinion against him – it is USA that will somehow seem diminished.
It would be fine if it is a freak result of history that a publicity-grabbing reality show bloke with a braggadocious locker room banter should have slipped through the railings to be a contender for the presidency. If not, we have to fear for American society. Do they want a president who “attacked immigrants, African Americans, Latinos, people with disabilities, POWs, Muslims and our military,” as Hillary pointed out.
