Get me out of here!

This is an amazing moment from the G20--Trump abandoning the president of Argentina on stage, saying "Get me out of here." Yes, he really is a dotard.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j27zIx2RAwIPeople who live on a diet of fiction expect life to follow its arc too--complications building to a climax and a resolution in which things tip one way or the other, to a sad or a happy conclusion. People who live on a diet of history and biography know that the arcs of lives and civilizations all tend to follow roughly the same trajectories--youthful struggles, brief maturities, followed by either an early death or a long decline.I submit that we've been looking at the Trump presidency through the first instead of the second lens. And we need to recognize that we and not Trump are the protagonists of this narrative. Trump is a symptom of our civilizational decline. He is America's having to get up and pee three and four times in the course of a night, forgetting the names of people we really should know, telling the same story over and over again, and waking up every morning with a back ache.Mind you, I say that not as a pessimist, but as someone who believes that we can and will do better than we are, even if we've damn near killed the planet getting this far. I just don't expect to live long enough to see a happy ending, never mind have it happen in the next week or month or year.