What Adults are Saying about Losing a Muse
To create requires a nudge. Nothing did that like this election.
Most of us, now exhausted, limp and with overloaded senses welcome the end of the 2024 election season. This caustic event has debauched many, stretched our sense of self-control and crushed civility at every turn. We’ve alternated between analysis, self-protection from hideous things and back again and almost always when done, run for the showers to remove the stench.
Referendum-style democracy is supposed to culminate in the collective people having the power without condition. But this year again proves such conditions are high and real. To exercise one’s voting power means first to have to run a gauntlet filled with events that turns decency inside out, makes compasses spin and lowers collective self esteem. Merely surviving a campaign’s social tumult has become its own challenge that no doubt has direct health implications. That’s why as riveted as we may be awaiting Election Day, we are even more grateful that thankfully, mercifully, it’s “over.”
But those chronicling all this are bound to be just a bit wistful. To create anything in the written, spoken or visual forms requires a kernel of something to push cognition from the brain to another medium. Such mental motivation is essential. In the 2024 Presidential campaign these nudges have been an endless and a husky Muse.
For eons Muses have served purpose and appeared in a variety of forms. Whether a siren from the sea, at the bottom of a bottle or peering lustily at dusk, Muses are to the creator what ignition is to a car. In the tawdry, ugly, jaw-dropping, stress producing election that is now ending these sparks have been everywhere. As witness consider things that have occurred just in the last four months:
+ A stunning Supreme Court opinion that provided one of the candidates (a former President) immunity from certain charges for alleged crimes committed in office.
+ An incumbent President who in the moment, before our very eyes, has Father Time crumbling his faculties.
+ An 11th hour candidate switch where the incumbent’s Veep now lead’s her party’s ticket.
+ Unbelievable, craven plans that pushes the country toward Apartheid and back 100 years in Project 2025.
+ Two assassination attempts to the opposition’s candidate who is seeking to become only the second President elected to two terms non-consecutively.
+ That same candidate who campaigns without civil or tactical orthodoxy and widely vows revenge to those he perceives as the “enemy within.”
+ Blatant illustrations of campaign demagoguery that haved churned historical wounds of racism, misogynism and antisemitism.
+ Campaign spending at unprecedented levels—in many instances—from so called “dark places” not identified.
+ At least a half-dozen confirmed instances of campaign or electoral hacking and direct meddling from hostile nations.
+ An unprecedented amount of “party-crossover” support from former leaders of the opposition and that candidate’s previous White House leadership.
+ In the campaigns final days, a blizzard of racism and anger from the opposition candidate culminating in a suggestion that high-profile opponents in her own party should be shot!
Look at that list! Every single one of these are book-length issues about Presidential campaign behavior that has never been seen in the modern age. Is it any wonder that Americans of all stripes are boiling with anger, anxiety, fear and just plain exhaustion? Isn’t it also clear this foul campaign has been an endless Muse?