Greatness, goodness in America

By Georgie Anne Geyer

So far as I can tell, nobody in public life seemed to notice that a phrase used at least twice in the sexually explicit "historic" Hillary Clinton-Donald Trump faceoff last weekend contained part of a famous quote from Alexis de Tocqueville.

I counted Hillary employing it twice - "America is great because America is good" - although the Good Lord knows one can only barely keep up with our candidates' repetitions these days. What I do remember, however, if only because I have quoted the phrase myself so many times, is that de Tocqueville's full quote was: "America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

De Tocqueville was the French diplomat, political scientist and historian who roamed across America in the 1830s, in its earliest and most formative years. Enchanted with the sheer "newness" of everything he saw, he wrote it all out in the two-volume "Democracy in America," a classic about our country to this day. He was particularly impressed with the number of churches he found everywhere, in sharp contrast to the godlessness of his Europe.

But what I found interesting in Sunday's "debate" between the two candidates for the highest position in the land was the fact that Candidate Clinton never carried through to the second part of the quote: "If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

She had every reason and every chance to do so. The tape from "Access Hollywood" had just been released, showing The Donald to be a filthy-tongued locker room blusterer, who not only looked at women with lust in his heart, but sounded like a predator-in-waiting who fully intended to act upon his trembling testosterone when the opportunity presented itself.

But even worse, at least to my eyes and ears, was the release, also last weekend, of a batch of old recordings from the potty-mouthed Howard Stern's radio shows, which were aired again by CNN.

Now - how wonderful and enlightening! - we could hear, compiled in The Washington Post, a candidate for president of the United States of America saying that he would "have no problem" having sex with 24-year-olds, that he "couldn't care less" if he satisfies the women he sleeps with, that "it's checkout time" once women reach 35, and that he had engaged in three-way sex. ("Haven't we all?" Trump asked Stern on his satellite radio show in 2008.)

But unquestionably everyone's favorite came when Stern, for whom no depth is ever dark enough, seemed to be "complimenting" The Donald about his beautiful daughter Ivanka and her voluptuous figure.

In one of their conversations, Stern, whose own ugliness of person defies description, asked Trump, "Can I say this? A piece of ass?"

An unperturbed Trump simply answered, "Yeah."

(Oh, what a lucky girl, that Ivanka is! Imagine what the rest of us could have achieved, had we had fathers like that!)

Now, these tapes, which were released a day after the "Access Hollywood" tapes and a day before the presidential debate, serve to bring up the crucially important underpinning of this entire discussion about the why-and-the-wherefore of the utter disrespect shown by Donald Trump's view of essentially all of us.

We need to remember that those of us in our later years did not grow up with this kind of language in the public sphere. Most of us did not grow up with it in our homes, schools or churches. Indeed, what we were taught was right: that filthy language is a way of demeaning other human beings and a way of defacing the spiritual and moral protections our societies should provide for us.

That candidates for president should use such disgusting words, with no concern for what it does to their societies or to the world, should be deplorable. In my youth, men who used these words were the men who hung around the taverns, who caused my mother to hold my hand tightly when we happened upon them, and whom my father would cross the street with us to remove even their picture from our minds.

But like most human developments, what we see today with Donald Trump and his vicious, vulgar words did not come out of nowhere. When satellite radio came to be in the 1990s, there were suddenly no barriers to explicit sex talk. Rupert Murdoch's cable channel, Fox News, came into being and now celebrates 20 years of "anything goes" television, while hundreds of cable shows have wiped out either the self-control or the outer controls over overtly sexual content.

But, in the end I have to say that perhaps Donald Trump and Co. have done us a favor. They have so demeaned and degraded rhetoric in the public square that we might finally notice it. Whereas before, we could escape it, today the degradation is so massive, so brutish, so deliberately meant to insult that hiding from it is no longer a choice.

So, thank you, Donald, for embodying within your fat, prowling self, with all that red-blond hair I just die to run my fingers through - and with all the most appallingly disgusting words I have ever heard brought together in one place - for showing us so clearly what life should not be.

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

© 2016, Universal