Guest columnist John Paradis: Dreading the ‘fix’ of a liar and cheat

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STAFF FILE PHOTO STAFF FILE PHOTO

By JOHN PARADIS

Published: 07-30-2024 9:13 PM

 

What will this land look like in 100 years? Except for infants and the very youngest children among us, we won’t know.

But in less than 100 days, what that future will look like will be decided.

Most everyone agrees that the November election will be the watershed moment in the history of our country and, it’s not too hyperbolic to say, I think, for the destiny of our planet.

I think often of the nature of time and of fate and of predeterminism, when I’m on my long walks — walks when I take in physical nature and where my mind often takes me somewhere else.

Off Old Wilson Road in Northampton, on the site of the old Pine Grove Golf Course, there is restoration in progress.

Once fairways, it’s now overgrown with native plants. Once trails where golf carts used to traverse, it’s now lovely trails with entrances into nearby woods for an enjoyable morning or afternoon of hiking. The long-term plan is to return this land to its natural habitat.

I go there nearly every day to escape the news of the world, but to also process what I am seeing, both before me among the trees and flora and in what lies ahead in the political and societal landscape.

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Both climate degradation and political devolution are real, and yet from what I can foresee, depending on how America votes in November, it could get far, far worse.

As a reader of science fiction, it’s not fiction anymore to think that in 100 years, our children’s children could be living in a mixture or combination of Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry For the Future,” Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” George Orwell’s “1984” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

I think of such dystopias while walking along paths that golfers once used. Inevitably, my mind is then consumed with irony: how there is one man who has caused the greatest damage to our body politic, in mind and soul, and how this one man is, himself, a fanatical golfer.

Because my mind races to places that are often fantastical, I have also imagined how had he lived here in Northampton, he would have surely bought the land I am walking through and would have surely made it into high-rise condos or into a subdivision of multimillion-dollar homes … or perhaps a casino.

That he would call such a development “progress” disturbs me.

That people would vote for such a person haunts me.

Golf aficionado and former Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly has often been asked to talk about Trump’s golf game and how it reveals everything you need to know about Trump’s obsession with golf and with Trump’s malignant personality disorder.

In his bestselling book, “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump,” Reilly breaks down Trump in this way: Trump cheats and lies about everything.

“I’ve always said golf is like bicycle shorts. It reveals a lot about a guy,” Reilly joked earlier this year. “And what it reveals about this guy is that he cannot lose. He has to win, and he will do anything to cheat.”

“And I know because I played golf with him, and he took seven mulligans. He took a ‘give me chip-in.’ I’ve never even heard of a ‘give me chip-in,’” he said.

At all the commissioning schools for military officers in our Armed Forces, there is an honor code. “A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do,” states the United States Military Academy.

The code pervades all aspects of military leadership for those who are in training to take the oath of office in serving our nation and in defending our Constitution. Integrity and honor are the basis for everything.

Air Force officers play a lot of golf on well-manicured, military-operated golf courses. You never cheat. It is presumed that if you cheat at golf, you bend the rules at other things, too, and that’s not who you want serving beside you — your wingman in battle.

Trump, on the other hand, has no problem cheating and cheats regularly in golf and in life. He even says he will fire military generals and replace them with NASCAR drivers. Things would be “so different,” he said, if he just replaced military personnel with football coaches.

If Trump can replace them, what else will he do? That’s the question before us this November. If inexplicably you know anyone who is still voting for Trump, the liar and cheater, tell them these things, and hope they will listen.

“Get out and vote,” Trump told Christian fundamentalists recently. “Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians ... Get out, you’ve got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

We have less than 100 days to change minds … or else. We will be “fixed.” And, this time, we will not be restored.

John Paradis is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. He lives in Florence.