NEVER MIND GREATNESS. ALL I WANT IS A STATE OF GOOD REPAIR.

Bookworm comes out of his room to propose that instead of greatness, Our President concentrate on "normalcy."  There's been too much turmoil, and it's time for another American High, perhaps?

Thinking about it, the parallels between now and one hundred years ago are uncanny. As in 1920, we’re heading into an election in 2020 on the heels of war (two decades of it), one epidemic disease (that politicized decision-making turned into an economic disaster), and a series of anarchist riots and terrorist attacks across America. All of which gets me back to Harding and his slogan: A return to normalcy.

While everyone likes a bit of excitement now and then, people crave the normal, especially people who care for young children or who are elderly. At least, they crave normal when normal is virtuous. In North Korea, normal is awful.

For the majority of Americans, however, normal has been a good thing. When our troops came home from WWII they craved the American normal as much as their fathers had upon their return from the first European War.

I was a child of the WWII generation (meaning that I was born after the war, but every adult in my world had experienced it, sometimes with incredible brutality), so I saw firsthand how all these adults also embraced normal. They walked out of the camps and off the battlefields, got jobs, got married, had children, and lived normal lives.

It doesn’t mean that they were necessarily all normal people. Looking back, my parents and many of their peers were deeply damaged by their experiences — but they were still creating lives of studied American normality. We boomers benefitted from it, although most of the boomers have been anything but grateful.

I'm not sure how well that history lesson works. President Harding might have set a standard for twentieth century corruption, or at least that is how advocates of Good Government often describe his presidency. Between the Harding presidency and the return from the War (which was effectively over, 75 years ago today) came a brief deep recession during the Spanish flu pandemic, a Great Depression, and global thermonuclear war. As far as the boomers, yes, the hippies and the yuppies got most of the attention from 1965 or so until the mid-1990s, but each of those cohorts were not quite the majority of the boomers, although they might have been the most vocal and ultimately the most miserable.

I do want to call attention to a passage toward the end of that essay.

Trump promises peace by reinstating the normal, which is the rule of law. Biden promises peace by saying that, if we give the rioters, Marxists, and anarchists what they want, they’ll go away and leave us alone. He’s too demented, perhaps, to remember that appeasement has never worked in the history of all humankind, but the leftists surrounding him should and do know better. They don’t want peace. They want chaos because they see that as a path to power.

There is a school of thought among the commentariat that perhaps if Democrats get the presidency, and perhaps the Senate as well, the unrest will stop.  Jake Johnson of Common Dreams begs to differ. "If Biden wins, we'll be at his door on day one, demanding the kinds of structural reforms that advance racial, economic, and environmental justice," the statement continues. "But before that, it's clear what we have to do: This November, we have to #VoteTrumpOut in swing states."

The temper tantrums, whether the mission succeeds in the swing states, or not, will likely continue to take place in the states run by Democrats, simply adding to the pain the Wuhan coronavirus and the urban wilding has already brought.