That's Quite Enough Out of You, Mr. President

That’s it. The President has disturbed my sleep.

I don’t say this to try to be funny. It’s a plain and sorry fact.

All my life, I was never the kind of person who had trouble sleeping. I’ve been a light sleeper, in the sense that many things could readily wake me up, but I nearly always returned to rest with equal ease.

Over the past several months, I’ve felt a mixture of rue and pity for my friends when they’ve declared on social media that they’re upset or terrified by the new President. Me, I’ve chosen the practice of steering clear of any “news” about him. I did my best to ignore him.

There wasn’t anything he had to say that I cared to hear, and I didn’t feel I should needlessly stir up my emotions by paying him the slightest bit of attention … not least because he seemed to crave it so badly and demand it as his due when he had nothing of substance to offer.

Much of what he did and said appeared self-aggrandizing and a performance mostly for effect, not as an expression of any deeply felt beliefs or aspirations on his part. So it was certainly not anything I needed to worry my head about, especially since there was nothing I could do about it.

I woke up early this morning after having gone to bed later than usual last night. I did everything I could to go back to sleep; even plugged in my iPod and programmed soothing progressive jazz by Oregon, but it was no go.

The proximate causes of my restlessness, I suppose, were a rebuke I posted to a slight acquaintance from high school who probably voted for the new President (although like many of his supporters, he’s not appeared to be all that proud of the fact but unaccountably cagey; he hasn’t been eager to come right out and say so) and had just posted an insulting witticism about Senator Elizabeth Warren, so I typed a stinging riposte just before shutting down my laptop and going to bed . . .

And the death of a friend.

The shocking news last night that a woman I knew in high school -- she was a sophomore on the close-knit and spirited cross-country team when I was a senior -- reportedly passed away in her sleep seemed . . . well, a symptom of our times, since she despised the new Chief Executive as much as anyone I knew.

It’s an equal mixture of hilarious, sad, and infuriating that the current occupier of the Oval Office as well as his supporters repeatedly tell the rest of us “get over it,” as if we’re still primarily driven by resentment over the election three months ago.

That’s not it, folks. I’m enraged by the events of every new day TODAY.

I’m infuriated about each and every thing the President does NOW. None of it represents how I see this country, what I think is in its best interest, or what I believe a President -- any President -- should be doing or focusing on.

I really can’t think of ONE THING this President has done that I can say is acceptable policy, or, for that matter, appropriate behavior in a national leader. A President should direct his energy toward the big picture, not what headline was in the paper yesterday, who played a member of his administration on a comedy show last night, or whatever decision a retail chain made with regard to a line of branded goods, for heaven’s sake.

A President should not sweat the small stuff . . . and this one has been sweating the small stuff unremittingly ever since his inauguration just twenty endless days ago. Can any of his supporters point to a single admirable trait exemplified by a previous holder of the office and say the current one displays the same level of laudable behavior?

“He speaks his mind; he says what he thinks,” they tell us. Perhaps one could find a slight resemblance to Truman or Teddy Roosevelt in that, but those predecessors treated their opponents and their office with respect most of the time. And what this President thinks is too often vulgar, disrespectful, small-minded, and sometimes not even coherent.

In fact, he has managed to amass an array of the weaknesses and faults of his predecessors: the paranoia of Nixon, the womanizing of Kennedy, the vulgarity of Johnson, the incoherence of Reagan toward the end, the execrable English grammar of W. Only in every case, he’s worse than they were.

Seven and a half weeks ago on this blog, I only half-seriously predicted that the new President would not last two years in office. Unaccustomed to its demands and the slow pace of government work, he would resign in frustration, I theorized. It was a half-wishful thought.

But I’m coming to the conclusion that I should, in all soberness, revise my prediction downward: I’m not sure he’s going to be around Washington for even a year. Not because he’ll be impeached or go down in a cross-fire of lawsuits: I don’t have any confidence that the GOP-dominated Congress will move its massive posterior forward with the first, and the President is long accustomed to the latter in his private affairs (which he pays lawyers to handle, anyway).

No, I’m afraid he is going to collapse physically. I solemnly believe the stress is going to crush him. My wife has observed that he seems to be getting heavier than even the unhealthy girth he carried during the campaign, which may or may not be the case.

But his obsession with his image, his fixation on what people say and think about him, and his insistence in responding to every single slight and irritation, is not healthy, in the strictest medical sense. As a private businessman, he could always take a day, a week, a month off, if he chose. Now there's no escape, and I don’t think he’ll be able to withstand the constant media attention he cannot control, however hard he tries … or the pressure, much of it self-imposed.

I say this with absolutely no joy or anticipation of the event. It won’t be pretty for him, and it will be devastating to the nation, both when it happens and until that time.

But maybe then I’ll be able to sleep again.

Rest in peace, dear Anita Crousser, Marshfield Class of ’79.