Last week was….discombobulating.
I wrote from Brooklyn on that Friday about the grim comedy of Weekend at Biden’s, and watched live on TV from a plane to California that Saturday as Donald Trump was nearly assassinated.
By the time my column ran in print that Sunday, reading it felt like opening a time capsule.
This week could go the same way.
While the Republican Party has been uniting around its standard-bearer, the Democratic Party is in open revolt against its pick.
A decrepit Joe Biden, three weeks after his debate debacle eliminated any remaining doubt voters had about his diminishment, says he has no intention of stepping aside as president or as his party’s presumptive presidential nominee as I write this on Friday.
That may change before you’re reading this on Sunday.
Whatever he finally decides and whenever he decides it, there’s a reckoning due for the Democratic leaders and their instruments in the press who managed not to publicly notice the commander-in-chief is much too old for the job until long after that was obvious to nearly every voter and he’d nonetheless cleared the field and won what was in effect a one-candidate race to be the party’s nominee.
The people desperately trying to reestablish their credibility now presumably justified denying the obvious and whistling past the graveyard by framing Trump as such a grave danger to American values and norms that it gave them license to violate their own.
But even if the ends would justify the means, their decision backfired and triggered this electoral avalanche bearing down on the president and his party.
Biden likes to say “don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”
But voters doing just that are increasingly abandoning him, to the point that a convention where a 70-year-old retired professional wrestler with a debauched personal life ripping open his shirt to endorse Trump seems like the calming, unifying option to enough Americans that the 45th president who reluctantly left office in disgrace amid a defeat he still won’t acknowledge appears to be on a glide-path to winning election as our 47th president — with few checks on his power if down-ballot Republicans benefit from his winning appeal and claim full control of Congress.
America is discombobulated, and there’s no chance it can recombobulate.
Of course, it was never combobulated in the first place.
That’s arguably true as a question of history, though increasingly embracing a narrative of secular original sin is part of what’s put the Democratic Party in this hole in the first place.
But it’s also baked into the word itself, which is distinctively American.
“Discombobulate” is one of the dog Latin coinages that caught on in the 19th century, often as a sarcastic or humorous way of showing someone appealing to phony authority.
Instead of saying someone was eating, a person signifying pomposity could say they were “scrumplicating”; instead of saying someone was leaving abruptly, a person could say they were “absquatulating.”
If that feels “confusicating,” well, you get the idea.
As America confronts a mostly unwanted choice between two men who would each be the oldest president ever if they make it to the end of their next term, a lot of voters are feeling as discombobulated as a Trump tangent or a Biden mid-sentence meltdown. Anyway…
The negative form of a positive word that doesn’t exist but has hung around long enough to have its origins mostly forgotten seems like an awfully apt symbol for this stupid, dispiriting moment.
Even more than you can’t uncrack an egg or unring a bell, you can’t recombobulate — or have ever been combobulated in the first place
There’s a lesson in that for the people talking about Making America Great Again, again, and also one for the people trying to stop them in a contest between two political appeals centered around what they’re against rather than what they’re about, each framing the other as an existential threat to the nation as we’ve known it.
Don’t hold your breath for either party to learn that lesson, or assess afterward how we ended up here any more than they did after the peak of COVID or after the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008.
It’s always easier to keep whistling past the graveyard, until you’re buried in it.
Count me among the many Americans feeling “splifficated,” which doesn’t mean stoned but rather was dog Latin for being beaten or foiled.
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.