"We're All Gonna Die"(!!!)
Yes, someday we all will perish from the Earth, regardless what happens Tuesday. So I've decided to ignore the Doomsday prognosticators for these last few days of election season and be...optimistic??
Happy Weekend Before the Apocalypse WOOOOOO!
J/k.
Actually, after many days of alarming news about the election, I just read some poll data from an individual who…….seems to know polling quite well? I guess?? And he is very confident that Pennsylvania is in the bag for Kamala already, and that the presidential race on the whole will NOT be close and WILL, in fact, be called on Election Night for Harris.
So we got that guy’s ballsiness going for us.
Who’s my source? Hell, I dunno. After years of sanctimoniously harping on people to show me their sources or don’t expect to be taken seriously…I’m not sure what this guy’s credentials are—other than he’s very confident, and he shows his work, and more than anything I really just needed to hear good news, so…I’m running with it. And I figured you might want to head into the weekend with a little blindly encouraging hearsay alongside me.
However, this guy is not as excited about the Dems’ chances in the Senate. I can’t really get a read on his thoughts regarding the House, either.
Supposedly the House has a better chance to go blue than the Senate has to remain blue. So, I am going to head into this last weekend before yet another Most Consequential Election of Our Lifetimes fairly optimistic there will at least be one house of Congress that’s light on the MAGA.
Mainly because I’m tired of being pessimistic.
Heavier and Heavier Tolls Along the Pursuit of Happiness
These days, I am roughly 85% pescatarian and 15% Ooh, pizza! HELL NO I don’t care what’s on the pizza just give me the pizza so I can eat the delicious pizza-ian.
In an ideal Universe, I would stop eating meat altogether. But…it’s hard. The more I’ve avoided thinking of meat as the foundation of every meal, though, the easier it gets. The thought of placing any kind of fat, gristle, tendons, or sinew inside my mouth gets grosser and grosser to me all the time.
That said. I was experiencing a particularly anxious week a couple weeks ago, and while at Kroger, I caved and bought some packets of Buddig sandwich meat. I just wanted to be able to mangle together a quick-n-easy sandwich for lunch each day, so I didn’t have to think about what I was having for lunch.
I grew up on those paper-thin Buddig deli slices (they’re actually thinner than paper-thin). And I know they have tons of salt and are injected with untold toxic artificialities. But I knew they wouldn’t have lumps of fat in them.
When I opened one of the chicken packets—historically, the chicken Buddig slices have been my favorite—an aroma wafted up my nostrils that smelled exactly like when I drive by the Tyson plant off of I-69 on my way up to Indiana: equal parts chicken meat, chicken shit, and dirt.
Not that that stopped me from preparing, and swiftly consuming, the chicken sandwich. Although I did slather extra mustard and mayo on it, to sop up some of the chicken-ness.
So…I’m confident I could totally get along without Buddig deli meat sandwiches and go full pescatarian. I’m much less sure I could go that final step and do without seafood.
I mean, salmon is soooooo good. (And good for you!)
So, speaking of salmon…
Here’s a New York Times gift article about Ketchikan, Alaska, a former fishing community that’s been forced to rely mostly on tourism. Per the pic at the top of this post, they pitch their little 8,000-person town as a vacation destination based on two hooks:
They are “Alaska’s 1st City”
They are “The Salmon Capital of the World”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Imo, my 8,000-person hometown—Bryan, Ohio—boasts far-superior hooks: It’s the home of the Dum Dum sucker AND the Etch-a-Sketch.
But salmon’s cool, too, I s’pose...
Anyway. Until I make good on my personal goal to, eventually, give up meat entirely, I want towns like Ketchikan to thrive. (I want them to thrive after I give up meat entirely, too, but…you know what I mean.)
Unfortunately, the article I linked you to above is about how Ketchikan is quickly gaining infamy as The Landslide Capital of Alaska due to climate change.
The Times piece hit me perhaps a bit more than it might have if this election weren’t on my mind so much. Because what’s most striking about this story to me is the reaction of some Alaskans to city councils considering the adoption of landslide hazard maps.
It seems like a pretty objectively good idea: keep citizens safer by alerting them to the areas that are most likely to experience landslides when (increasingly frequent) severe rainstorms hit.
And who thinks these maps aren’t such a great idea? The folks who own land around those hazardous areas. Better not to publicize the danger, or else their property values will shrink. Indeed, there was enough public pressure in the Alaskan capital of Juneau recently to get city assembly members to vote down the adoption of landslide maps.
It’s important to note that these folks don’t appear to be a bunch of greedy corporate monsters. They’re mostly everyday people whose retirement is riding on the value of this land. I’m sure there are some who are just in it to turn a giant profit and have no personal skin in the game. But many actually live on the properties in these danger zones. And yet they go on record saying they’d prefer to remain in the dark about any talk of landslide probabilities.
Another Times story (←gift link) featured a similar theme. New Yorkers of modest means have been scoring the homes of their dreams, overlooking the beach in Staten Island, Long Island, and elsewhere. The catch: they have to be willing to risk getting flooded out—and usually without flood insurance since no company wants to operate in such high-risk flood zones.
I admit that at first these scenarios stood out to me because they seemed like prime examples of “it won’t happen to me”-ism. As in:
“I know it’d make me, my family, and my neighbors safer if we adopted landslide hazard maps. Buuuut…I need to maintain my property values, and a landslide’s probably not gonna happen to me, so…”
…or…“I know this house is in a flood zone, and I couldn’t afford flood insurance even if a company were willing to sell it to me. Buuuut…I really wanna live next to the water, and the real estate agency’s willing to sell it to me, and a flood’s probably not gonna happen to me, so…”
I’ve always imagined “it won’t happen to me”-ism infecting members of government en masse, as well. They’re perhaps good family men and women once they get home from the Capitol building, or their state capitol building, or city hall. But while lawmaking? They hang their consciences on the coat rack on the way out their front door each morning and vote their politics.
Republicans—usually wealthy ones—want to dismantle Obamacare. ‘Cause let’s face it, their own loved ones aren’t gonna need it. And let’s abolish regulations so we can make “Capitalism at All Costs” the government’s sole priority. ‘Cause none of our friends or relatives are gonna develop black lung working in some West Virginia coal mine.
Let’s ban abortion nationally, because (1) it’s politically expedient, and (2) hey, it’s not like one of our daughters is getting knocked up before she’s ready for kids. Or in the unlikely event that did happen, well…
…that’s different.
Or if one of their daughters experienced a pregnancy-related medical emergency that sadly required an abortion? That’s different, too. As in, she’d be flying to San Francisco to have that procedure. Like, tonight. On the redeye.
But none of that’s gonna happen. Probably.
EDITOR’S NOTE: It works both ways, too. It may seem logical to drastically cut, say, the military. Because, “Hey, we could cut the Pentagon’s budget in half and still have the greatest fighting force the world’s ever known. And it’s not like we’re ever gonna need that dominant of an army.”
Until we do need that dominant of an army, that is.
Just sayin’—I haven’t heard as much about cutting the military budget since these Axis of Adversaries began to loosely coalesce (a.k.a. the CRINK Crew: China + Russia + Iran + North Korea).
Again, the Alaskans and New Yorkers profiled in these articles seem like average everyday people. And I know diddly-schnitz about what it’s like to buy property in compromised locations and have to make tough decisions accordingly.
But my gut tells me that the more a “Capitalism at All Costs” agenda pervades the decision-making of those in power, the more it will trickle down and influence the decision-making of folks in the middle class and below—like the Ketchikanians. They must feel like they have two choices: make these kinds of poor decisions and roll the dice, or give up on any further pursuit of happiness.
That’s What It’s All About…
As my guy Bernie Sanders has pointed out many, many times throughout this election cycle, we’re no longer teetering on the edges of oligarchy—a government of, by, and for the wealthy.
We’re there.
It’s like how generals from the first Trump Administration have been saying he “meets the definition” of a fascist. America still operates as a democracy more than any other form of government. But we have to be willing to admit that we already “meet the definition” of an oligarchy.
And that’s what this is all about, ultimately. That’s why Elon Musk is suddenly jumping up and down for Trump—literally so on campaign stages, and figuratively so in board rooms. Because if reelected, Trump will be focused on the fun stuff, like siccing the military on his enemies. He’ll be only too happy to hand over the rest of his administration’s agenda to his rich and powerful pseudo-buddies.
The wealthy will get to not only skip out on paying their fair share of taxes. There just won’t be any taxes—for them. Meanwhile, these tariffs on imports Trump keeps insisting are a good idea? Well, they probably are. For the rich. But they’ll function as a hefty tax on everyone else. (I don’t understand how it all works, admittedly. But to borrow a Trumpism, people [in this instance, economists of repute] are saying…)
They’ll try to abolish as much meaningful regulation as they can get away with. They’ll dismantle as many government agencies meant to help average everyday Americans as possible. And of course House Speaker Mike Johnson intends to end Obamacare.
If the White House, the Senate, and the House all turn red on Tuesday, they’ll probably start trying to stealthily pick away at Medicare and Social Security, too. To say nothing of Medicaid and other popular, and often essential, safety-net services.
Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are what his followers love about him, even if they’d never dream of (knowingly) supporting an authoritarian government. So today’s new-fangled Republican Party is praying that enough people are pissed about their current prospects that they choose to “blow it all up” again and bring Trump back to power. It won’t just be Trump pushing the agenda forward, though.
(And we should totally insist on officially calling it that, the “New Republican Party (NRP),” since it’s far more insidious than the Grand Ol’ Party of old.)
Trump will hand the keys—the most consequential keys, at least—over to the Musks and Stephen Millers of his orbit. (If you don’t know who Stephen Miller is, I’d advise keeping it that way.) Their goal is to make the American Dream a kind of country club available only to the rich and powerful. And they won’t be too interested in expanding membership.
How could the Trump/Vance team pay so much fealty to Putin and Russia? Because Putin’s Russia is the model. Putin and his oligarchs rule absolutely. They allow for just enough prosperity outside their circle of privilege to keep their people from revolting. And that’s the low ceiling the pursuit of happiness in America will have as well if our would-be oligarchs get their way.
I’ve mentioned these two sci-fi films before, and unfortunately they’ve been taking up residence in my head again lately: Elysium and Ready Player One. (I haven’t watched (or read) The Handmaid’s Tale, but I know that it, too, is an example of science fiction that feels light on the fiction these days.)
A couple trailers for your consideration:
Elysium (2013):
Ready Player One (2018):
I don’t think even Elon Musk sees the end game as being this kind of apocalyptic domination of the poor by the wealthy. But even if it’s subconscious, I do think the level of domination people like him do intend to achieve inherently and necessarily requires extreme expansion of the already-expansive wealth gap in America. They intend to get richer, and we’ll therefore—inherently, necessarily—simply have to keep getting poorer.
So it could very well be that we’ve traveled as far as we can with this whole “republic” business. The form of government Ben Franklin announced we’d been given—“if [we] can keep it”—in 1787. And hey, we kept it for a helluva long time, right?! You know, relatively speaking…
If Trump does win Tuesday, it doesn’t necessarily spell the end of American democracy. Everything I’ve been spouting off about here is all conjecture, pretty much.
But as I sit here right now, at 2:15 a.m. on a Friday night (laaaaame), I’m holding out hope—if for no other reason than I’m a completist, and it’d be a damn shame if the United States imploded a measly year and a half shy of its 250th birthday.
250’s such a nice round number.
P.S. - Just one more New York Times gift article for you. It might comfort you as it did me. Not only because the authors are saying Trump’s definitely gonna lose. But in particular they think it’s going to come down to the turnouts of educated women versus uneducated men. And for my money, I’d even like our chances if it were uneducated women versus educated men, so, I’ll definitely take the reverse…):
“A Democratic and a Republican Pollster Agree: This Is the Fault Line That Decides the Election”
P.P.S. - I’m always trying to figure out if singers are lip-synching. I won’t hold it against you if you didn’t click through on the above danger zone or in the dark links, but if you did…how ‘bout those two very different performances from the same era? I think we can make a pretty good argument for which guy’s lip-synching (and guitar-miming) and which guy’s the real-ass deal.
(Sorry, Kenny. Although, I will say that if one were to sit down with an acoustic guitar and play both your catalogs, you’re probably the better songwriter. It’s close, though.)
P.P.P.S. - Amazon Music’s had me writing 350-word essays about individual popular songs. After writing about HARDY’s, Zac Brown Band’s, and Eddie Money’s greatest hits, the last song they assigned me, out of nowhere, was the original “When Sunny Gets Blue” by Johnny Mathis, which appeared on his original greatest hits package, Johnny’s Greatest Hits.
“Sunny” is just exquisite. Mainly because of “The Velvet Voice,” but also because of the enchanting atmosphere created by Ray Conniff and His Orchestra.
I try not to use this word lightly, but this track is an absolute masterpiece on every level. And when writing about it, a thought came to mind. If Trump wins, and shit starts to hit the fan?…
(…obviously you knew I was going to link to this real quick after using that phrase…)
…I, for one, will be seeking out more examples of pure beauty like this. I’d like to think the worst wouldn’t have to happen for me to stop and smell the roses, though, so here:
Even if my election pessimism proves un-warranted next week (oh please oh please), I hearby do solemnly pledge, with y’all as my witness, to take many more moments to stop what I’m doing and seek out beauty. Amen.
And if my election pessimism proves to be well-founded?
Well…I s’pose when I do muster up the will to seek out and find beauty, I’ll find it even more breathtaking than if Trump had lost.