Only yesterday?
How about yesterday plus 22 years?
Have we really changed that much?
I spent several weeks in England and France in the summer of 2001, much of the time in Oxford and Paris, with a couple of days in London. It was about two months before Osama bin Laden’s attack on America and it was sort of a quiet summer. One of the few specific memories I have was of an evening in early July when Nicole and I were invited to dinner with her niece Anne an domse of Anne’s friends.
I was the only person there who hadn’t been born in France, but I got something of a pass for having a French wife and two French-born children.
The main question the guests had for me was how the U.S. could possibly have elected George W. Bush president. He had been in office less than six months, and folks on both sides of the Atlantic were basically unimpressed with him. We may not remember, but in the summer before the attacks, Gee Dubya was looking ever much like an unimpressive one-term president.
The question was fairly blunt.
“How could you people elect someone like George W. Bush as your president?
I thought of reminding him that we had elected Ronald Reagan too, but I thought they might be too young to get the comparison. I told them how American voters had this goofy idea about having a beer with their president, and that Bush had essentially been running against a robot.
It wasn’t a good answer, but it was an answer.
Then came 911 and everything changed.
Yes, everything.
Sad to say, but America got stupid and Republicans got greedy. They got their massive tax cuts and their nearly eternal was in the Middle East. Bush got revenge on Saddam Hussein for trying to kill his daddy.
Bush was so awful in his second term that America took a huge step forward, electing a Democrat in 2008 when was both half-Black and half-Muslim ancestry. Of course there was a negative side to it. The people who would later be called Trumpanzees, low-information voters who hated blacks and Muslims, came out of their caves,
And eight years later, when they nominated the basically unlikable Hillary Clinton, the Trumpanzees’ dream came true.
We got a president who ran — and governed — on hate.
And even though he had been dead for years, Osama bin Laden won.
He never wanted to conquer, he just wanted to make Americans hate each other, and with the help of Donald Trump, he succeeded.
Now comes the long road back.