Plumbing Impeachment's Depths.

Watching the ongoing circus, I can't, oh please forgive me, help but feel a spasm of pity, a twinge of sympathy for the piñata in the Casa Blanca as he suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, however self-inflicted they may be. If one pricks even a prick, does he not bleed?

While his fawning base accepts him as the champion of anti-corruption, do they really forget that he has  always craved the spotlight, that even as a young man he barely concealed the profound corruption under the freshness of his early years? Under the first down of adolescence, he was worm-eaten to the heart; he was the fruit which contained only dust. In his young and flabby body, never hardened by the rigors of sport, there stirred only a soul as old as Saturn - a soul as incurably unhappy as any soul had ever been. This should leave us terrified, as it is enough to give one vertigo to peer into the black hole of his empty existence. Your griefs and mine are nothing in comparison. He cannot rest day or night; and like a heliotrope in a cellar, he twists and turns, writhing toward a sun he cannot see, a radiance he cannot feel. He is one of those men whose soul is seared, having not been steeped in the waters of adversity before it was conjoined to his body, tormented by the conviction that he once had wings, but now has only leaden feet. Doomed to the knowledge that he has never been nor ever will be passionately loved, he has sometimes inspired in me such a pity and interest that I could easily adopt a tone and manner which display an understanding enough to delude. Hence do I understand his need to surround himself with sycophants that play their part with the skill of the consummate actress; bright and melancholy or sensitive and voluptuous, they feign anxieties and admiration, shed false tears, summon to their lips artificial smiles and ferret out for him the mannequins of love he needs so he can truly believe all the wrong is on the other side, and thus ever spares himself of ever feeling any remorse.

There are none in his circle who dare to wield the pin that will prick his inflated balloon and let the wind out of of his plasticized persona, explaining what to many is the mystery of the fragile ego that even when wielding the world's sharpest of swords with the deadliest intention on the weakest of enemies, is yet injured to the quick by the slightest of stings from the tiniest needle.

 Nothing depraves you like not being loved.

So do I smile in sardonic amusement at the impeachment circus when I reflect how it has hardened our perspective. Before I was an interesting outsider. Now, I am a luckless dog. Before I was a lone voice in the wilderness, now I am drowned and ignored in an overcrowded chorus. No invalid has ever been more unpleasantly jostled out of their self-compassion. It is difficult to accustom myself to the new position all at once; I had begun to lose the faculty for sympathizing with others' griefs. It is hard to realize in all this brouhaha that my own superfluous life has been exposed as being entirely negligible and scarcely anyone's concern but my own. In this colossal circus, with its PT Barrnumb's ringmaster, who can stop to consider a lone and useless voice? Am I not but another comfortable parasite? And, I once again ask your forgiveness, an egotist to boot?

This Reality Show is searching out everyone, concentrating a beam of inquisitive light upon everyone's mind and character and publishing it on social Media for everyone to see. And the consequences to many folk has been a keen personal disappointment, as we ignoble persons had thought we were better than we really are.  We scarcely anticipated that the Trumpman Show was going to discover for us how our emotions are so despicably small by comparison, or our hearts so riddled with selfish motives. In the wild race for security in these amoral times both men and women have all been driving so close to the shoulder that our eyes have been too glued to the road to be able to spare a moment's thought for others; bereavement has brought bitterness and any modicum of social security, indifference.

 Yet not even the debates have brought any awareness of how pathetically we still cling to fragments of the old regime that has already passed  - like shipwrecked sailors we clutch bits of floating wreckage, deaf to the thunder of our world being smashed to pieces yet turning pricked-up ears to newspaper gossip while garnering Facebook "likes", still coveting our cherished aims -wealth, celebrity, success - while in spite of everything grabbing for the golden ring while the heavens fall; revolving like tattered windmills in a devastated landscape. We are all the same case: I type out my blog, and watch the telly in the evening, and old ladies still read the gossip columns while ignoring the headlines and news. We look like a nest of frightened ants scurrying over each other in panic when someone lifts the stone.

That leaves me wondering if perhaps our sympathy for ourselves hasn't become so unfailing that we don't deserve anybody else's. Yet, is it not just as much how it's been transmogrified by the process of being aired like dirty  laundry in a polluted environment? This blog, for example, I believe gives the impression that I behave in public far worse than I actually do. Whereas herein I let myself go with unrestrained rants, in actual life I rein myself in to such an extent I am almost another person. Would you believe it, my acquaintances say I am full of quick sympathy with others and extraordinary cheerfulness, even gay, with, if anything, too much of a tendency to see the good in others where they insist none exists. It almost seems I lead a double life: with most people I pass myself off as a complaisant, amiable, even mealy-mouthed creature. While here, I stand revealed as a contemptuous, arrogant malcontent. It's as though my life has left me embittered, with the crabbed temper of the disappointed man, whereas I feel I'm rather unassuming, affable, diffident - even humorous. It is only the manner in which the voices of fools are amplified and apparently taken seriously that have me becoming insolent, aggressive, and self-declamatory, pouring out the acid sentiment  of a vitriol thrower driven by revenge, before I can let myself become quiescent. It seems like it's my self-appointed duty because others are too constrained by their busy schedules to ferret out and publish the facts that lie behind the lies. Yet, I can't seem to decide which elicits the more helpless feeling: to sit and let the distortions pass uncommented on, or sitting and pounding away at my keyboard watching circumstances pounding away at my malleable character and shaping it wrongly.

Or perhaps not. For even well into adulthood I maintained a rather naive confidence in the goodness of mankind, long after I realized that of all the virtues, kindness was the hardest to be found. Yet I remained, if not an optimist, at least rather sanguine about men and women, believing them to be, along with myself, far better than they actually are. I haven't really crushed this illusion even now. I even still rub my eyes in disbelief that we are in fact so dastardly hypocritical, such ingenious self-deceivers.

It's why I can't quite grasp some of the surprising rhetoric of those who consider themselves 'good ' people at the antics of our PT. A consummate liar, a thief, a scam artist and serial bankrupt, he would be hard-pressed to surprise me by any of the things he has done, while the feigned self-serving ad-funded outrage at his outrages is itself outrageous and far more bitterly disappointing as it leaves neglected real problems that are instead left to fester, with real consequences, while the critics grow rich on the perfidy they expose while hiding their own behind mAdmen finance.

We are all become so cold, so aloof, so self-centered even to our warmest friends. Men of piety love god, but their love for each other is most often as tepid as used bath water, their affections as frosted as an Englishman's reserve. As for myself, I hesitate in showing affection as if I were not sure of it. I am afraid of self-deception, I hate to find out I've been undercut, taken advantage of, fooled into a foolish dotage, charmed by a charlatan. My analytical mind dissecting everyone except those most deserving of it, so it's those I love who receive the brunt of my suspicion, my having been so often stung to the quick. Besides, such yearning only makes me feel foolish. Only the rich or the beautiful are so fortunate as to be amorous without being ludicrous and pitiful.

All of which leaves me to suspect that some time ago, somewhere in my life, I have been obscurely loved by some humble heart which I misunderstood or broke; that somehow, inexplicably, I myself was the ideal of somebody else, the pole of a suffering soul, the dream of a night and the thought of a day. If I had looked at my feet, I wonder if I would have seen some beautiful admirer yearning for a glance, a touch, any acknowledgement of their existence or return of their affection. I went about raising my eyes to heaven, longing to gather the stars that escaped me, while disdaining to pick the soul abloom with affection that was opening its heart to me only to have me trod it down into the earth. I shudder with the realization that I have made terrible mistakes; asking of love something other than love, something love could not give. I have forgotten that love is naked, I have failed to understand the meaning of that magnificent emotion. Instead I have expected of it robes of splendor, feathers and jewels, sublime intelligence, knowledge; I've sought in it for poetry, beauty, youth, even  power; everything, in short, that it is not. Love can only offer itself, and whomsoever wants to draw something else from it does not deserve to be loved.

 And nothing depraves you like not being loved.

While nothing assures that you won't be as not having the capacity, or the willingness, to extend that most cherished of emotions to another.

In which regard I can hardly find my own past behavior unimpeachable.