Avalanche

     When you watch footage of large objects or masses in movement, such as collapsing buildings or huge waves, these phenomena appear to be moving in slow motion.  Look at footage of an avalanche.  There's a majestic slowness about the snow, appearing to be a white waterfall but retarded in speed.  It's actually moving very quickly, can achieve speeds around eighty miles per hour in about five seconds.  From a distance, though, it doesn't look like that.  The World Trade Center towers, too, seemed to fall in slow motion, and too bad for the people on the pavement too close by that they didn't.
     On May 17, 2012, Mitt Romney spoke in Boca Raton, Florida, to an exclusive set of rich supporters.  One of his remarks focused on "forty-seven percent" of all voters who would support President Obama in the November election.  Romney said he couldn't be concerned about them, that he'd never get their votes.  He said they are those "who are dependent on government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that the government has a responsibility to take care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it...These are people who pay no income tax."
     Imagine the kind of lowlife loser who believes he's entitled to eat.  God, how sickening that such humans exist.  People, children even, who want to eat!
     Romney said these ruthless words to a roomful of rich motherfuckers enjoying a nice dinner and rounds of drinks prepared by a bartender who secretly recorded the presidential candidate's words on his phone.  The term, "forty-seven percent," became Romney's doom.  It was obvious now what he actually thought of nearly half the electorate: they're a bunch of fucking losers who want the state to do everything for them.  Romney himself, with his corporate background, didn't mention the very low tax rates American corporations pay, or his own fourteen percent tax rate.  Like many presidential candidates, he was a great avoider of the truth in 2012.  As the Governor of Massachusetts in 2006, he had signed into law a state-run healthcare system that Obama essentially used as a model for what came to be known, derisively, as Obamacare.  Since he was running for president against Obama, Romney felt he had to distance himself from his one humane accomplishment: providing healthcare to those in need of it in Massachusetts.
     Because he couldn't let himself take credit for doing that particular good deed, there wasn't much to recommend him.  Obama won fifty-one percent of the popular vote, while Romney seduced his own 47 percent of voters, while he was hoping for the fifty-three percent implied in his heartless remarks captured by a concerned bartender and broadcast to the world.
     Nearly four years after Romney's Boca Raton speech, Donald Trump (who endorsed Romney in 2012), finds himself pathologically confident as always, but, according to the latest AP GfK poll, faced with an unfavorable rating, among Americans, of sixty-nine percent.  Hillary Clinton, in the same poll, has a fifty-five percent unfavorable rating.  In 2012, "forty-seven percent" strongly for Obama, in Romney's estimation, was a huge number of people, and it was.  Sixty-nine percent of the U.S. population comes to approximately 220 million people.  Trump, whether he admits it or not, finds himself facing an electorate that mostly disapproves of him.  "Unfavorable," "disapprove" are polite ways of saying, "dislike," "hate," "loathe," "makes me sick."
     Hillary Clinton, too, with her fifty-five percent rating, is faced with about 175 million Americans looking at her without enthusiasm, to be polite about it.  Granted, many of these people are too young to vote, or just don't vote.  Even so, both Trump and Clinton are the frontrunners, and logically (in the world of B follows A), they will win their parties' nominations and compete until November, before commencing a new era of God-knows-what on Inauguration Day in January, but with these lousy poll numbers, I wonder if either one of them will face Chief Justice Roberts and say the Oath.
     It indicates the times we live in, perhaps, that Americans find the frontrunners so objectionable; both of them of the same generation, born a year apart, early Baby Boomers, the generation so badly running the world these confused years.  Young American voters don't buy into Trump and Hillary Clinton--suspicious characters, not forthright.  Trump, too, is a racist and bigot, and denies climate change, belief strategies that don't appeal at all to America's youth.
     Going from Romney's 2012 controversial and fatal remarks, forty-seven percent of Americans didn't like him, but now even Hillary Clinton can't boast of numbers that good, and Trump is now looking like the most unpopular kid in school, except among his asshole friends.  It's taken four years for these numbers, as applied to presidential candidates, to grow into something devastating for the political establishment itself, as it demonstrates its lack of competence in promoting qualified and palatable candidates for the highest office, a job that should cry out for serious consideration, but has lost out, at least this time, to an avalanche of popular dissatisfaction, and has collapsed from forty-seven percent to Trump's abysmal sixty-nine.

                                                                              Vic Neptune