In Buffalo, babies are born criticizing the doctor's delivery technique. When he was in elementary school, our youngest son, listening to me hold forth on The Latest Outrage, cocked his head, squinted his eyes and said, "Dad, I know what you are. I say this with a loaded pack of offenses on my back. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. We have all lost friendships, fractured family relationships, felt contempt and a capacity for hatred we did not know we possess burble up from some ugly place deep within us: "You support him?" "You're with her?" we marvel, and poison words spill from our lips and our keyboards, "Benghazi" and "Stormy," "collusion" and "missing emails" bobbing along in that occluded stream. Today, political disagreement is an act of aggression, a declaration of war. In 2006, if the campaign signs your neighbor displayed on his front lawn were "not like mine," you could shrug and shake your head a little and decide, "But he's all right, and we get along fine." Got lots of churches, we've got lots of barsĪnd the kids around here, they fight our warsĮven when we disagreed, there was a sense that we were united, we were all Americans. In my neck of the woods, the town where I live What do we do? Where do we go? A decade ago, the Bottle Rockets recorded a song, "Zoysia," that perfectly described the nation's mood in the aftermath of September 11: The fever symptoms returned, and with them, the fear that we aren't going to be OK, not anytime soon, maybe not anytime ever. Wednesday evening, my Facebook and Twitter feeds filled with breathless accolades for Trump's "standing up" to Putin. Wednesday afternoon, as the criticisms and denunciations of the president's comments poured in, I felt the way you feel when a fever breaks: weak and tired, but exhilarated, too, grateful that the worst was over, certain that everything was going to be OK. "This is it," I thought, "This is going to break the hold the president has on the country." Putin, who always seems to be a fez and a hookah away from being one of Peter Lorre's coconspirators in some '40s film noir, stared blankly at his lectern as Trump railed and bloviated and did what Trump does. RELATED: Trump's murder-suicide of the WestĮven Vladimir Putin, the chief architect of a Soviet-style plan to undermine American democracy and throw Europe into political and social disarray, seemed uncomfortable with Trump's rambling denunciation of the U.S. It was an act of autobombastic extemporization, and all over the world, viewers watched in stunned disbelief. Trump talked and talked and talked and talked, the words flowing out in poorly reasoned ribbons, slowly strangling the speaker. Ali and Frazier had the Thrilla in Manilla call Monday's discomfiting press conference the Hullabaloo in Helsinki.
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