Obama, Trump and the 'zigzag' nation

Voters chose a 48-year-old, urbane, liberal black man, then a 70-year-old, unrepentantly coarse white man who is conservative, or something.

Change comes in all forms and with wrenching lurches in a nation founded by bloody revolt and enervated through the generations by political and cultural revolution, sometimes to the edge of bloodshed or over.

The U.S. serves up in-your-face cowboy culture, in-your-face counterculture, aggressively faith-based political movements, electric Bernie Sanders socialism and lots more chances to smoke pot legally, as well as workaday lives and pinstriped suits.

Americans vote for shake-up artists, not every time but enough times to set the country apart from democracies where the ship of state turns more slowly and majestically.

Trump, the zag, is a hurler of insults, a raw orator you can't turn away from if you can bring yourself to tune in, a boor with women, a peddler of falsehoods that made millions of eyes roll but spoke to a larger truth in the eyes of supporters.

Obama came to national attention with a speech of poetry and power that dreamed of red states and blue states joined spiritually as united states.