Catfish and Horseshit: Debate Night in What’s Left of America
It was the most important debate in American history, according to the people paid to pontificate on cable TV, and my vantage point was an abysmally attended “Debate Party” at a fish house down the road.
Cheap wine, oysters, and about-to-go-stale beers were all on special, as relayed by the printer-paper flyers ablaze with Old Glory and maybe a QR code strewn about the place. The thing itself might be too blasé to be paid attention to — at least live. What I was here for was the crowd.
Would this be the momentous occasion foretold my the media mavens and misters, cradled into the national conversation by a majority of Americans? Would the bar be full and raucous and reeking of political rancor when the heavy blows started landing? Would this be a “We The People” moment reminiscent of our nation’s very founding, but at a southeastern seafood dive instead of The Green Dragon?
The answer is no. The bar was barren, save for a few of the regulars: namely a young, loud kid from a fancy spot up the road who haunts this place at close every Tuesday. The kind of generous numbskull who’ll tip his way into your good graces, and who has just enough self-awareness to compensate you at a level consummate to his shitheadedness.
Another couple sits across the bar from Regular Dude, openly gay and openly rooting for Donald Trump. They must be rich.
Scattered on the patio are a few other tables, with no TVs in their lines of sight. Good for them. Smart, I think. This could be a bloodbath.
But it wasn’t.
The general media consensus seems to be that Vice President Kamala Harris was the clear winner. Her poise has been a rather oversized topic of conversation in the hours following the debate, but Trump did himself no favors here. Almost immediately you could sense his tone and inflection turning predatory. He’s a man who got to where he is by being so fucking annoying and loud that people acquiesce to him for the peace and quiet of his grinning departure. He’s basically budged his way to the front of the political line by being so repulsive that we’d rather let him win than listen to him whine.
Harris, by being just Harris, illuminated Trump’s cantankerous nagging for what it was, and he knew it. The swine-like snorts that he steals into his nasal cavity between words quickened about eight minutes into the affair. He grew agitated, then began to hunch over his lectern, looking very old and acting very weird: the two things his image coaches absolutely did not want to broadcast to the nation.
The small crowd of the fish house ate it up. Harris would get a shot in at Trump, and you’d see nods of approval from around the place, but no whooping or clapping. Instead, just a thankful acknowledgement that Harris wasn’t doing too much –– no easy task with the sheer amount of low-hanging fruit that Trump provides.
When Trump spoke, however, the bar erupted in laughter. It was communal laughter, with looks darting around between the dozen or so inebriated souls, all with the same message: Holy shit, are you seeing this? This is really what our nation has come to?
Somewhere around 16 minutes in, the former President’s drugs begin to take hold. Adderall? Maybe. Provigil or Modafanil? Certainly possible. He’s getting annunciate-y. Hard T’s and crips S’s. And with his new “Leave it to Beaver” haircut that someone on the PR team suggested would make him look younger. His hair is browner, too. They’re really trying to paint their way out this? My lord, they’re lost.
The pundits are getting it right, at least thus far (despite none mentioning the cut and color from Donny). They’re all coming to the same conclusion: Trump can no longer control his own tongue, and Harris played him like a fiddle — at least in terms of tone tonight. The laughter from the barflies tells us that.
But the moment of the night does go to Donald Trump, dubious as it may be, for his suggestion that Haitian migrants to America are “eating the dogs” and cats of this great nation. When corrected by a moderator stating that they’ve verified this to be untrue, the former Commander in Chief of the US military and its vast nuclear arsenal, copped out with a 5th-grade retort: “This is what people are telling me!”
What my gut is telling me, from the corner of this bar, is that this laughter does not bode well for Mr. Trump.
