So many years ago I can hardly remember—repression and denial being keys to positive mental health—I would spend an inordinate amount of time every Sunday evening ironing shirts for the coming work week. Inordinate because I wasn’t very accomplished at the task and, perhaps surprisingly, never really got better with practice. Or maybe it was just the Zen-like state of watching wrinkles slowly disappear that hampered my progress. Whatever.
I performed the task because the laundry I’d formerly sent shirts to seemed to have an overpowered hydraulic press that inevitably broke buttons. And sewing on new buttons—assuming I ever had a supply of new buttons—was something at which I was far less skilled than ironing. More than once I fell back on hoping my tie would hide the missing buttons but that seemed sub-optimal, career wise.
At the risk of losing what readers I have left, this is a good time to say my point, should there be one, has nothing to do with ironing shirts. It has to do with the sense of hearing. Hearing without seeing.
Hearing without seeing is an important survival skill. Think unseen-but-heard bear, cougar, whatever, while you’re out walking in the forest. Or, more frequently, the horrible scraping sound of a marginally-controlled skier/boarder right behind you on an icy run.
One Sunday evening’s ironing marathon coincided with a political debate. Lost in the fog of time is the minor detail of whether it was a U.S. presidential debate or a Canadian party leaders’ debate. Not important.
What was important, and what surprised me, was the heightened sense and mental picture I had of the candidates because I wasn’t able to see them speak, only hear them speak. The inflection and nuance in their voices, their delivery, their timbre, cadence and rate of speech left me with a very different sense of whether they were being honest or just shining me on than I would have had if I’d been distracted by their visage.
Those moments of aural disconnectedness were like visual tells gamblers search opponents’ faces for. They verily screamed, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
So I was interested in revisiting that phenomenon last week when, bobbing at anchor somewhere in the San Juan Islands, I was only able to pick up the much-awaited presidential debate between former president Trump and hopeful president Harris on a Sirius radio that amazingly has worked now for more than a decade without any subscription. Magic radio.
I was also keenly aware I probably wouldn’t have watched the debate if I’d had the chance because I recoil in horror at the sight of the former president.
What I heard was a relatively calm woman with a hopeful, inclusive, even joyful vision of the future on one side and a grumpy, paranoid, narcissistic, bigoted, untruthful old man who dreamed of being a dictator on the other. A woman who embodied and embraced the potential that lay within the kaleidoscopic reality of the country’s diverse population and a rich, white man who believed everyone who wasn’t like him was a criminal, a threat, a scourge.
He was darkness; she was light. He was the Evil Empire; she was the Rebel Alliance. He was hopelessness; she was hope.
From the opening statement, Kamala Harris managed to do what no other person had done in a debate with Trump—she got under his skin, put him on his heels, made him play defence and sent him completely off message. She made him sound both dangerous and ridiculous. He spent most of the two hours defending himself, preening his bruised ego and rebutting her volleys with all the creativity of a schoolyard bully responding with, “Oh yeah?”
His statements got more and more unbelievable. Whether it was defending the size of his crowds at campaign rallies and their willingness to stick it out to the end, parrying the parade of former “most brilliant” people in his administration who have come out decrying how unhinged and incompetent he is, defending the honour of the Jan. 6 rioters, claiming he’d end the aggression in Ukraine and Israel in a day, the porkies kept on coming and getting weirder and weirder.
They culminated in his explosion about the dietary preferences of immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. “They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in—they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” The claim, recently repeated by his vice presidential candidate, was so outrageous one of the debate hosts had to weigh in and remind the increasingly loony candidate Springfield city officials claimed there was no evidence of any truth to the social media claim.
What I missed by listening and not watching I read about later and am sorry I couldn’t see. It was the looks of utter disbelief on Ms. Harris’ face at so many of his unbelievable—except for the true MAGAcites who seem to believe everything he says—claims.
Even staunch Republican heavyweight Carl Rove was nonplussed by the meandering, ineffective performance of the former president. He summed up his analysis of the lopsided debate by writing, “there’s no putting lipstick on this pig. Mr. Trump was crushed by a woman he previously dismissed as ‘dumb as a rock.’ Which raises the question: What does that make him?”
For the second time since Joe Biden’s departure, I have some hope my former home and native land won’t end up with the chaos and fury that were the hallmarks of Trump’s four years of hell. Even from a distance there seems to be a cultural change taking place, one that will further devalue the distrust and hatred he personifies.
After the chaotic experience of his first term, the crushing personal toll people lived through during the pandemic years, the disruption it brought on in all aspects of commercial life that still linger, the global inflationary spiral that’s left all but the wealthiest feeling economically vulnerable, there is a deep longing for better days, for hope, for community, for the kind of joy Ms. Harris seems to personify, especially by comparison to her opponent. There seems to be a growing culture ready for a positive change.
We’ll find out in early November. After that, we’ll find out whether it might migrate across the northern border and take root in this country.
