The Electron Pencil

The two-time popular vote loser whose name I’m often loath to say/print/hear has quickly found a hammer to beat Kamala Harris over the head with. He now calls her Laughin’ Kamala Harris, adding cachinnation (yep, swear to god, it’s a real word — look it up!) to his dependable bag of slurs and characterizations that include Sleepy Joe, Crazy Bernie, Pocahontas, Crooked Hillary, Stone Cold Phony Beto O’Rourke, Snowman(woman) Amy Klobuchar, Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and…, and…, well, there’ve been way too many to list here.

The 45th President of the United States has a lengthy track record of failures — marital, personal, business, political, and…, and…, well, again there’ve been way to many to list here. He is a master, though, a virtuoso, an artist, a prodigy of insults. He makes the bully you might remember from high school look like Marianne Williamson.

Harris, apparently, emits huge guffaws, deep gut, from the heart, kitchen table salvos of laughter. The convicted felon, serial stiffer of contractors, and proud pussy grabber finds such uninhibited emotion something to ridicule.

Soon after it became apparent Harris would be the new Democratic candidate for president, the GOP standard=bearer said: “Have you ever watched her laugh? She is crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh…. She is nuts.”

This new line of affront should come as no surprise inasmuch as the man spewing it never, ever, ever laughs. I mean really laughs. He’s clearly incapable of feeling and expressing pure joy. He cannot, it is obvious, let himself go. He’s as tightly wound as the hawsers of an ocean liner at port. Not only that, he never really smiles. Oh sure, he smirks a lot, especially when, for instance he asks the crowd at one of his rallies what we should do with all the people coming over our southern border and someone responds, “Shoot them!”

But smirking is not smiling. Smiling communicates happiness, something that runs counter to his message and the visceral appeal he has to a sizable portion of the American electorate. He — and they — are much more comfortable living in their cesspool of rage and grievance. To smile, to laugh, to say “Ah, I feel good this morning,” is foreign to them.

Perhaps it’s generational.

Many Trumpists are aging white people, the kinds of folks who recall their parents telling them about the Great Depression and World War II. I’m an aging white person (who, natch, does not count himself among that sulky set). I recall those of my parents’ generation telling tales about bread lines; soup kitchens; unemployment; meat, sugar, and tire rationing; global bloodletting, Nazis, sneak attacks, the Holocaust, and any number of other horrors they faced everyday starting in 1930 and lasting for the next 15 years. That so-called Greatest Generation might have found laughter a luxury. How can one belly laugh when nobody can find a job and 60 million people are being slaughtered?

My father, for example, was made uncomfortable by the sound of children’s laughter. Any number of times, when my brother and I would be off giggling in another room, Dad would shout from his recliner, “Stop that laughing!”

Even as an eight-year-old, I found that downright bizarre. I never felt, when so scolded, that I was doing something wrong. Dad, I concluded, was a miserable crank.

As I grew older, I’d tell others of my generation about this and they’d say, “Oh yeah, my Dad yelled at us all the time for laughing too! It was so weird!” It was a phenomenon common to working class families. My old man and the millions of his generation grew up squeezing pennies, being forced to go to work at the age of 13 and 14, then getting drafted to fight in bitter cold, African deserts, and South Pacific jungles. When peace and prosperity came at last, they had to spend most of their waking lives working at unrewarding jobs in soulless factories, where their health was endangered and their spirits crushed.

The sound of kids laughing must have been, to guys like my father, worse than the 120-decibel din of fingernails on a blackboard.

The Republican candidate for President of the United States is 78 years old. His old man imparted to him a deep abhorrence to laughter. Mary Trump has written that Fred Trump warned his son against laughter. To do so, the old man said, “is to make yourself vulnerable. It’s to let down your guard in some way.

Which is true. We do become vulnerable when we laugh. We do let our guard down to guffaw. These are necessary releases, as important to our health as fresh air, clean water, a balanced diet, exercise, and a good lay every now and then.

“Laughter,” senior editor Michael Mechanic of Mother Jones writes, “is pretty much universally seen as positive. Indeed, the list of prominent people who have spoken and written of the value of laughter is long. It includes Catherine the Great, Charlie Chaplin, Charles Dickens, Robert Frost, Kahlil Gibran, Martin Luther King Jr., William Shakespeare, Gloria Steinem, Virginia Wolfe, and on and on. Perhaps more relatable to Trump would be Andrew Carnegie, who is credited as saying: ‘There is little success where there is little laughter.'”

How sad that an entire population of men grew up in dread fear of laughter. How sad that tens of millions of us want one of them to become our leader — again.