"We're All Gonna Die" (!!!)
Regardless what happens Tuesday, apparently! Except that my current election outlook is sunnier than it's been in a long time...
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 going for us.
Who is this source, you ask? Hell, I dunno. After years of sanctimoniously harping on folks to provide their sources or don’t expect me to take you seriously…I’m not sure what this guy’s credentials are, other than that he’s very confident, and he shows his work, and I just really needed to hear good news, so…I’m running with it. And figured you might want to blindly go into the weekend with a little encouraging hearsay alongside me.
This guy’s not as excited about the Dems’ chances in the Senate, though. Can’t really get a read on his thoughts re: 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 the latest Election of Our Lifetimes fairly optimistic that there will at least be one house of Congress that’s light on the MAGA.
Mainly because I’m tired of being pessimistic.
It Could Happen to You…
These days, I am about 85% pescatarian and 15% “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. It’s hard, though. But the more I don’t think of meat as the primary ingredient to base the rest of the meal around, the easier it gets. The thought of ingesting any kind of fat or gristle gets grosser and grosser to me all the time.
That said. I had a particularly anxious week approaching a couple weeks ago, so I caved and bought some packets of Buddig sandwich meat so I could just make a quick sandwich for lunch each day. I grew up on those paper-thin Buddig deli slices—actually thinner-than-paper-thin deli slices. And I know they have tons of salt and are injected with toxic artificialities. But at least they won’t have lumps of fat in them.
When I opened one of the chicken packets—chicken’s been my favorite Buddig slice, historically—it smelled exactly like when I drive by the Tyson plant off of I-69 on my way up to Bloomington, Indiana, to see my mom and aunt: equal parts chicken meat, chicken shit, and dirt.
Not that I didn’t make, and then eat, the Buddig chicken sandwich. Although I did slather extra mustard and mayo on it, to lessen the chickenness.
So I’m confident I could totally get along without Buddig deli meat sandwiches. I dunno about seafood, though. Salmon is soooooo good. And good for you.
Here’s a gift New York Times article. It’s relevant because it’s about Ketchikan, Alaska, a former fishing community that now relies 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: Call me biased, but I feel like the two selling points for the 8,000-person town I grew up in—Bryan, Ohio—are superior. Stop me if you’ve heard this one (too late): It’s the home of the Dum Dum sucker and the Etch-a-Sketch.
But, you know, salmon’s cool, too.
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 that, too, but you know what I mean…)
Unfortunately, the article I linked you to above is about how Ketchikan is quickly becoming 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 to such an extent. Because what’s striking about this story is the reaction of some Alaskans to city councils’ consideration of adopting landslide hazard maps.
It seems like a pretty objectively good idea—keep citizens safer by alerting them to the areas most likely to experience landslides after increasingly frequent and severe rainstorms.
And who thinks the maps aren’t such a grand 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 to get city assembly members to vote down the adoption of those maps.
It’s important to note that these folks don’t appear to be a bunch of greedy corporate ass-munches. They’re mostly everyday people whose retirement is pretty much 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 others are actually living on the properties in these danger zones. And yet many of them are still on record that 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. They just 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 I saw them as public-sector 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…”
“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 otherwise good family men and women once they return home to their families. But while lawmaking? They vote their politics, and leave their consciences on the hat rack on the way out the front door each morning.
Republicans, usually wealthy, want to dismantle Obamacare. ‘Cuz 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. ‘Cuz none of our friends or relatives are gonna develop black lung from working in any West Virginia mines.
Let’s ban abortion nationally, because it’s politically expedient and, hey, it’s not like one of our daughters is going to get knocked up unintentionally and not be ready for kids yet. Or if that did happen, then…well, that’s different. Or what’s the likelihood that one of their daughters experiences a pregnancy-related medical emergency that sadly requires an abortion?
It probably won’t happen to them. Probably.
EDITOR’S NOTE: It works both ways, too—although not at the same levels in my opinion. But it may seem logical to progressives to drastically cut, say, the military. Because, hey, we could cut the Pentagon’s budget in half and still have the world’s greatest fighting force. It’s not like we’re gonna need that dominant of an army.
Until we—and, indirectly, the rest of the free world—do need that dominant of an army. 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.
My gut tells me that the more a capitalism-at-all-costs agenda pervades the decision-making of those in positions of power, the more it will trickle down and influence the decision-making of folks in the middle class and below. Many must feel like they have little choice but to make these kinds of poor decisions in their 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 who worked for Trump 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 in the end. That’s why Elon Musk is jumping up and down for Trump—literally on campaign stages, and figuratively 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 for his rich and powerful pseudo-buddies to determine.
The wealthy will get to not only skip out on paying their fair share of taxes. There just won’t be taxes—for them. These tariffs on imports Trump keeps insisting are a good idea? They 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 people [i.e. 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 citizen as possible. 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 probably will start trying to stealthily pick away at Medicare and Social Security, 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 admit to preferring an authoritarian government. And so this new Republican Party (we should insist on officially calling it that, the New Republican Party, since it’s far more insidious than the Grand Old Party of old) is hoping enough people are pissed off with their current prospects that they choose to “blow it all up” again and bring Trump back to power. It won’t be Trump pushing the agenda forward, though.
He’ll 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 recommend 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 oligarchs rule absolutely. They allow for just enough prosperity outside their circle of privilege to keep their people from revolting.
I’ve mentioned these two sci-fi films before, but my brain’s been going back to them: 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. But here are 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 wealth gap in America. They intend to get richer, and we’ll therefore have to keep getting poorer.
So it could very well be that we’ve traveled as far as we can with this republic Benjamin Franklin announced we’d been given, “if [we] can keep it,” in 1787. And hey, we kept it for a long time, relatively speaking. If Trump does win Tuesday, it doesn’t necessarily spell the end of American democracy. Pretty much everything I’ve been spouting off about is all conjecture, obviously.
But as I sit here right now, at 2:15 a.m. on a Friday night for some reason, 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 divided a measly year and a half shy of its 250th birthday. That’s such a nice round number.
P.S. - Just one more New York Times gift article; I think it will comfort you as it did me. Not necessarily because the authors are saying Trump’s definitely gonna lose. But they are essentially saying it’s going to come down to the turnouts of educated women versus uneducated men. And I’d personally like our chances if it were un-educated women versus educated men:
“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 and in the dark links, but…two very different performances from the same era, and I think I can make a pretty good argument for which guy’s lip-synching (and guitar solo-miming) and which guy’s the real-ass deal.
P.P.P.S. - I finished my latest assignment for Amazon Music a couple nights ago. I’ve been writing 350-word essays about individual popular songs. After writing about HARDY’s, Zac Brown Band’s, and Eddie Money’s greatest hits, my concluding song was the original “When Sunny Gets Blue” by Johnny Mathis, which appeared on the original greatest hits package, Johnny’s Greatest Hits.
“Sunny” is exquisite, mainly because of “The Velvet Voice,” but also because of the mystical and 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 moments of pure beauty like this. I’ll have to. And when I do make more time for these kinds of experiences—something I don’t do nearly enough—I think I’ll find them even more breathtaking than if Trump had lost.
However, regardless who wins, it’s gonna be a mess and anxiety-laden for some time. So there’s gonna be ample reason to take comfort in beautiful things either way.
So see?? Yet another thing to look forward to, regardless.