"When someone shows you who they are the first time, believe them." - Maya Angelou
The contentious, vitriolic and unpredictable race for the American presidency mercifully entered its final month this week and the consensus is that November 8, 2016 cannot come sooner!
In the race for the Republican Party's nominee, Donald James Trump proved all pundits and prognosticators wrong by emerging victorious, in the process besting more seasoned and better-connected politicians. Unfortunately for the party, the real estate mogul's campaign style, persona and (past) private life have also proved to be as mercurial and more damaging than Wikileaks' expose of the inner workings/deliberations of Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Audio tapes recently released provided incontrovertible evidence that Donald J. Trump is a crass, misogynistic sexual predator who actually leers at his own daughter Ivanka!
Eeewwww!
Similarly, though not as revolting has been WikiLeaks' continued drip-drip-drip of hacked email evidence that Hillary Clinton is, as alleged by Bernie Sanders, too cozy with and beholden to Wall Street bankers, multi-national corporations and globalists. The former First Lady has also been revealed to be a master of doublespeak; simultaneously holding at least two policy positions - one in private and a different one in public.
Politicians!
Undeterred, supporters of Donald Trump claim that they are not "electing a Sunday School teacher or pope"! They argue that they are electing someone to "go change Washington (DC)". Supporters of the Republican nominee don't seem to mind that their man has a string of utterances and behavior that have psychologists, psychiatrists and students of social and human sciences scratching their collective heads in utter disbelief.
Jeff Sessions, Senator from Alabama and Trump surrogate twisted himself into a pretzel trying to explain the Donald Trump heard on the "Access Hollywood" tape. The senator from the "bible belt" state offered that he was "not sure" whether grabbing a woman by the genitals is sexual assault nor "how 'that' would occur"!
For the record, the US Justice Department's definition of "sexual assault" includes "any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the explicit consent of the recipient."
Across the aisle, supporters of Hillary Clinton cite her extensive resume -- former First Lady's/Senator's/Secretary of State -- as, pardon the pun, trumping her many foibles including coziness with Wall Street, the near non-existent firewall between the Department of State (during her tenure as SecState) and the Clinton Foundation, her use of a private email server and her alleged tacit support of Bill's philandering ways.
Juxtaposing the now-ending American campaign with the one just beginning across the Atlantic Ocean in Kenya, there are striking similarities as Kenyans across the Jubilee/CORD divide become contortionists and apologists explaining their support for those who have publicly staked seemingly untenable positions including "eating meat even as others look on salivating"!
At least they are "telling it like it is" and not engaging in "vitandawilis"!
Like most Americans, Kenyans are being asked to choose between "the devil they know and the one they don't know" i.e. between the status quo (Mr. Kenyatta) and the "outsider-cum-agitator" (Mr. Odinga). A point of interest is the near-identical rhetoric and policy positions espoused by "outsider" Donald Trump and "insider" Uhuru Kenyatta. As previously written, the two men (and their supporters) have pushed increasingly nationalistic, faux patriotic and in the case of Trump, xenophobic agendas including "otherization" of opponents and detractors alike. The GOP/Jubilee axis includes a "law & order" platform that seemingly disregards police misconduct. Finally, I would add that the two sides have benefited from the "tyranny of the majority", the former underscored by the late Lee Atwater's "Southern Strategy" campaign. As a result, they have governed thus until now, especially for the Republicans -- thanks to the "browning of America".
The Kenyan half of the conundrum was aptly illustrated in a recent exchange I had with a friend on Facebook.
Shortly after Mr. Kenyatta's Freudian slip i.e. "eating meat even as others jealously salivated", I engaged a self-proclaimed "good governance" and "anti-corruption" activist in an exchange on Facebook. I was seeking to understand Sam's (not his real name) support of arguably the most corrupt presidency in Kenya's history.
Sam's obfuscation, prevarication and confluence of facts and timelines was classic and not surprising.
In a move reminiscent of the darkness portended by the "Taking Our Country Back" call to arms heard back in 2009 after Barack Obama took office, Sam first fudged the "lost years" that marked the dark period from which his version of Kenya's "gilded" era emerged. In Sam's mind, Kenya's 2nd president Daniel Moi was solely responsible for all that (had) ailed Kenya since independence. He asserted that it was from the Moi "Error" that Sam and his "patriotic" band of "real" Kenyans rescued the country!
Not Jomo Kenyatta's documented and demonstrable authoritarian ethnocentric post-independence fiefdom or Mwai Kibaki's bunker mentality that set the stage for the violence of 2007/8.
Stateside, the recent opening of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC could not have been more timely. The curated displays provide evidence of a past most fair-minded Americans do NOT want their country to go back to.
When I challenged the intellectual honesty of hoisting all that has ailed Kenya onto its second president, who incidentally was "following the footsteps" of its first president, Sam flipped the script with the dismissive "I have a much bigger scope and not just four years and not just on corruption but many other things". He then followed the dismissal with the non sequitur "I don't have do (sic) vote for Joho, Kidero, Raila, Uhuru, Waiguru or Ruto. My argument is purely academic"!
So after spending the better part of an hour debating and contextualizing the strengths and weaknesses of Mr. Uhuru Kenyatta and Mr. Raila Odinga, in true Trumpian fashion and obstinacy, it did not matter -- at least according to Sam!
Like the two sides vying for the American and Kenyan presidencies, Sam and I, remained stubbornly locked in our own set of facts and parallel worlds, speaking past one another!