It just occurred to me that my encounter with a creep in the swimming pool the other day could be a warning parable about the looming presidential election. From my discussion with Mark afterward:
“I had a lot of time in the pool to contemplate why the man’s behavior, even though objectively it doesn’t seem like much, was so threatening,” I said.
“It’s because he communicated, in several ways, ‘I am not going to abide by the normal limits of behavior,’” Mark suggested.
“Yes, I think that’s it,” I mused. “You’re forced to wonder, ‘What other rules of appropriate behavior are you going to ignore?’”
“Which made him not actually dangerous, since you weren’t going to ignore those signals. Threatening but ultimately not competent enough to be dangerous.”
An as-yet-unknowable chunk of the electorate is willing to ignore those signals.
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