Helen Hyde: In the Rain (1898)

"The result will mete out its own punishment. Vengence was never mine to deliver."

Slightly more people voted to elect The Oldest President (TOP) than voted against him ever holding public office again. He had abused his privileges during his first turn. He had been promising ever greater abuses if returned to office, so those who couldn't see any attraction to him as either candidate or ex-president were baffled as to why anyone might feel moved to waste their franchise on such a clearly unworthy character. Their vote amounted to an act of self-abuse, I suspect, or maybe it was just a mistake. Ask, though, and one acquires a fresh lesson in the human power of Rationalization, the attempt to make some irrational act seem reasonable in retrospect. Every terrible public servant has trailed a long line of Rationalizers behind them. They've attracted the Lesser Of Two Evils Crowd, who always seem to see only the worst in anyone representing an opposing party. They'd vote for Hanibal Lecter if he were a Repuglican running against anyone enjoying a more conventional diet. They also attract the partisan who never even investigate alternatives. They vote without reflection, choosing not to choose, a part of this country's sometimes overly-proud suffrage tradition. Democracies include even those opposed to democracy.

Then there are the Pig Shavers, the ones who split hairs. Perhaps the alternative was once distantly implicated in some distasteful adventure. Possibly, she once committed a public truth; maybe a hot mike caught her disparaging someone who deserved disparaging. She died for some in the instant that truth crossed her lips. Perhaps it was nothing she committed, but stuff she was implicated in by disparaging press. Those addicted to Faux Snooze often seem well-schooled in disparagement themselves. They say, "I don't know how I could support her after that," except 'that' never happened. TOP was exceptionally skilled at fueling such pseudo-reasoning, as though it bore even a distant resemblance to reason. Justification comes in mostly artificial colors and always lacks specifics. It features what "many are saying" without anybody ever saying any such thing to anybody about anything.

Ignorance depends upon a malleable mind that effortlessly wraps itself around just this kind of thinking. There are the one issue partisans, those who cling to a candidate for the thinnest of reasons. "He's the only one who spoke up against criminal masking mandates," tells everyone they're listening to someone who lives their life beyond the influence of rationality or reason. Rationalizing might most often describe a kind of insanity, the sort invoked for the sole purpose of bolstering the invoker's delicate sensibilities. They do not think of themselves as snowflake material, but they seem fragile and vulnerable nonetheless. Their defenses amount to little of substance. They explain nothing, the equivalent of insisting "because" as if that constituted a reasonable explanation. The ignorant might mount a defense as if they were merely parroting universal truths everyone already knows. These universal truths seem more similar to universal lies, metastasized and unshakable by any countering truths.

Rationalizing has long represented actions intended to formalize control in business, usually under the guise of improving efficiency. This behavior continues to enjoy widespread support, except among those for whom control gets exerted, for one person's rationality amounts to another's insanity, particularly when some manager inflicts improvement upon their subordinates "for their own good." Ego disqualification often results, where the processes please only those not in constant contact and/or dependent upon them. Improvements might always be possible, but not when implemented by some authoritarian pretending to understand details they never had to deal with. If one pays close enough attention, one learns that Rationalizing rarely improves anything, probably because we are not rational beings, contrary to popular propaganda. We are not precisely irrational, nor are we primarily rational in our choices. We might be best characterized as non-rational, odd mixes taken from various perspectives. We rarely qualify as any single anything.

The post-inauguration world will seem to overflow with excuses. As the fresh abuses come into sharper focus and promises fall unfulfilled, our world might find some reason to come closer to its senses again. Every election proposes impossible choices, though this last one seemed to offer only a single reasonable one. Those who chose unreason might have been fooled or confused. It might be a mistake to attribute thinking to very many who ultimately voted for him. They nonetheless contributed to an evil result, and I do not and will not buffer my language in fear of committing a public truth. Those who voted for him made themselves complicit in everything he most certainly will commit, and very little of what he will sponsor will in any way qualify as rational. However reasonable the explanations for voting for him might seem to those hapless voters who committed their own offense, they will not hold water in the post-inauguration real world that resulted. I insist that I can Rationalize at least as well as the least of my brethren, so I’ll try hard not to insult my intelligence or yours by engaging in it. Let's say they didn't know what in the Hell they were doing and leave it at that. The result will mete out its own punishment. Vengence never was mine to deliver.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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