Campaign 2016: Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show That Never Ends . . .

In the end, it was not the end, and the end itself is not yet clearly in sight.

Super Tuesday, the large-scale presidential primary election brawls in both parties came and went, but the beat goes on to the point that the process itself is becoming the daily bread of our lives, the elephant in the living room, the Moby Dick whereby we have all become the crew of the Pequod.

Put the blame on Donald Trump.

After a volatile, hard-to-stomach debate in Houston last week and awesomely childish brawls among Trump, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz leading up to Super Tuesday, Trump more or less lived up to expectations in the race for the Republican nomination, winning seven states — not only in the South, but also in the Northeast — and picking up delegates and votes across a swath of the body electorate.   

Almost everybody agrees that mogul-reality-show-host-celebrity Trump is clearly in command of the race, so much so that some members of the so-called Republican establishment — Mitt Romney and the frayed remnants of Jeb Bush supporters and donors most notably among them — are trying desperately to find a way to stop him.  Rubio, their chosen vehicle, although he won a late-night primary in Minnesota, fared badly, with results that one observer called “garbage-can on fire,” making a tight run in Virginia, but finishing third and second in all of the others.  Rubio’s contribution to the political dialogue included references to “small hands” and “stained pants,” which might make a good title for a country song, but not a source of inspiration. The schoolyard—sixth grade version—was taking over the campaign.

Ted Cruz, the assumed choice of Christian evangelists, managed to win his home state of Texas and neighboring Oklahoma plus north in Alaska, a state few people knew was having an election.  Still, Cruz is now making the valid claim that he has beaten Trump four times, and the less valid claim that he can stop Trump and beat Hillary Clinton in the general election.

With each debate and  with each primary election — from Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina to Super Tuesday — the GOP version of the campaign has taken on a feverish quality in which we’re all running hot and cold, sweaty and dizzy.

If you watch the talk shows and the late night shows and the election campaigns result shows and the debates and read twitter feeds, you feel swamped, inundated, at sea on a leaky boat, distracted.   It’s a little like the most unreasonable version of young love — which easily flips into obsession.  Everyone’s a predictor and predicator, everybody’s got a passionately held opinion, everybody loves somebody, and more importantly, everybody hates somebody, the candidates, the Mexicans at the border, the Muslims in our midst, the tax collector, the police and the demonstrators.

For this, we can blame the presence of Donald Trump.

Imagine for a moment the political landscape if Trump — perhaps on a whim as before or because of a curiosity-ego-driven decision — had not decided to enter the fray or enter it in the way he did.

We might be discussing Jeb Bush’s vice-presidential choice: Carly? Marco? Or talking about the danger of Ted Cruz or when Chris Christie was going to have an impact.  We might talking at least part of the time about the Clinton-Sanders ruckus among the Democrats.   We probably wouldn’t be talking about a wall, about torture, about someone’s hair, and we might not have ever heard the word “p—-” uttered by a presidential candidate. Megyn Kelly might not have made the cover of Vanity Fair. Maybe we would be seriously talking about climate change, executive orders, a comprehensive immigration plan, the pope or the quality of daily life in our cities.  David Dukes might never seen the light of day again. Maybe the death of Justice Anthony Scalia might be historic instead of a piece in a political campaign strategy. Maybe we wouldn’t be dreaming feverish dreams in which we cannot trump Trump.

Instead, we have a three-ring circus about all this.  If you watch the debates or the result nights,it seems surreal — a world full of maps and voter blocks, and data drivel and strategists almost weeping over the failures of their favorites. Predictions are made by experts from every political arena and are instantly proven wrong, especially those made about Trump.

You can’t trump Trump.  The media—whom he’s treated with disdain, contempt or outright threatening hostility—can’t help but cover him slavishly, showering him with free publicity of the kind that everyone else has Super PACs for.   He cajoles—be nice to me—he threatens—if you’re not, you’re going to pay a price (this to the Speaker of the House of Representatives).

By now, everybody has identified the source of Trump’s appeal.  It is the anger of disaffected, working class whites, mostly men, and their resentments of foreigners, immigrants, the rich (but not Trump) and, yes indeed, political correctness.

At his rallies, they and he feel unchained to say whatever they want and trash interlopers in their presence. In a Rolling Stone story, there’s a big photograph of Trump against the backdrop of his audience at one of his rallies.  The expression is self-pleased, but it’s the audience that tells the story. Take Trump out of it, and you’re at a hockey game — almost all young-to-middle-aged, white men having a good time.

You can’t blame Trump for everything.   The anger has been there a long time — anger with government, politics and politicians, the settled way of doing things, anger with a culture in which the rich get very rich indeed, the poor get poorer and the working class stops working. The cultural matters — abortion, Obama,  race, crime, gay marriage — come with the territory.

That anger and the political dysfunction that went with it has been there a long time — and got going with Mitch McConnell, who vowed to block every Obama initiative, the back bencher yelling liar at the president, the government shut down. Trump is only a master stoker.

It’s hard in a climate like this to think of anything else.

But we should, and we can.

Think for a moment that life goes on, that joy is there, and so is tragedy that can wound us in a way that the better angels in us weep, and we come together.

Think of the death of Prince Williams County Police Officer Ashley Guindon who was killed on the first day of her job, one day after receiving her badge. In her twenties, she was an American exemplar of service and living and giving in life with her service in the military, her education, her ambition.  Think of the long line of police officers and community members alike mourning her. The chief of police said she accomplished “more in her 28 years than I think I could in 100.”  “Hold each other up,” he told officers and mourners.  Members of the community also gathered together in a vigil for the other victim of the shooting, Crystal Hamilton, who was shot by her husband. She died protecting her son. They held candles for her, also, and I think most of us, and Jesus, too, would have wept at this, but also honored those who were lost.

Amid all the political turmoil, these things happened in life and our lives, too.

Tonight, it’s Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Megyn Kelly and the circus-as-politics continues under the big top of our lives.