Have you noticed something?
We are living in an age of cynicism so deep and pervasive that it distorts our politics, laws and society. It is the new normal. What was once clearly wrong now seems OK — or at least “the way things are these days.”
The cynicism spreads across Congress, the courts, the media, political parties, big business, the gun lobby — you name it.
The cynic-in-chief, of course, is President Donald Trump[1]. His lying, his Twitter storms, his crass character assassinations — “Crooked Hillary,” “Lyin’ James Comey,” “Little Rocket Man,” etc. — seemed funny at first, then cheap and crude, and now, most destructive of all, routine. “That’s Trump,” we say among ourselves, and shrug. With every Trumpian rant, magnified by our cynical indifference, our political discourse descends into the toilet.
But here’s a fair question: Who is more cynical, Trump or those of us who voted for him knowing he was a narcissistic fraud?
Some, I suppose, didn’t pay enough attention during the campaign to realize he was playing a joke on us and supported him in the hope that he really would do the preposterous things he said, like bringing back coal mining and manufacturing jobs, making the economy grow by 4 or 5 percent a year or magically curbing illegal immigration by building a “beautiful wall.”
