A State of Heightened Tension
There’s a way to deal with the election that you may not have considered…
I enter the final weekend before the divining of the US President with the quiet equanimity and fresh-faced optimism of Anna Karenina falling under the locomotive.
Thinking about Donald Trump and the two alternatives of
- spending my twilight years in Donald’s mad, dark kingdom as he executes his bloodbath of retribution; or
- experiencing the ineffable joy of never seeing his sorry ass or orange glow or listening to his vulgar, moronic randomness ever, ever again
is giving me, and not to go all TMI on you, but — a raging election.
It’s beyond painful, it’s been that way for months and it’s not going away, even though I’m positively guzzling bottles of Sudafed. There goes my holiday employment as Santa!
Voting for Prez is as American as getting shot in a classroom while eating apple pie, and it unfolds as a private, shameful activity that you do in a little booth, with watchers milling around in a state of heightened tension, waiting for you to do something illegal.
Democrats consider voting the single most important duty that citizens have in a democracy (or, all right, a republic, then). The American political landscape is haunted by the ghosts of the poor, the people of color, the unhoused, students, the pregnant women, those without photo ID in triplicate… the list could go on and on, so let’s say anyone who’s not white, male, heterosexual and wealthy who has attempted to vote any time since around 1930.
By now, it’s official: Trump Republicans don’t believe in voting, at least for Democrats. The Founders themselves didn’t believe in voting, at least not the popular kind. That’s why they invented the system of the Electoral College, so that an unqualified, tacky, authoritarian populist would not end up becoming President just because some unwashed, uneducated slave owners chose him.
Instead, that privilege was reserved for the washed, educated slave owners.
This all worked perfectly until 2016, when the Electoral College crowned Donald Trump, an unqualified, tacky, authoritarian populist.
Democrats do believe in democracy. Democrats love voting and they will do anything to vote: vote early, vote by mail, vote in person, with or without photo ID. They’re regular votin’ fools.
This is a problem, because, and my experience confirms this, Americans are, generally, pretty progressive and reasonable, and therefore tending slightly to the centre-left, thus less likely to vote Republican. The poor, the unhoused, women, POC, queers, are especially likely to vote Democrat, because Republicans, who don’t believe in government, just power, have never had any plans to help them.
Their policies towards these groups consist of punishing them for being poor by making them even more poor, starving them and kicking them onto the streets, or, in the case of queer people, pretending they don’t even exist and refusing to name them, because if you can’t name it, it isn’t real (and could someone, once and for all, please save the goddamn children — ? I’m very grateful).
But if Democrats ignore all this infrastructure built to prevent them voting, and then just go ahead and vote anyway, Republicans are on Orange Alert. They are quite clear that the more people vote, the more Democratic politicians will win, and Republican plans to simply take the power they believe is due to them are in disarray. Democratic politicians definitely have plans to help the poor, the unhoused, and all the rest. This puts white, wealthy, male heterosexual politicians very on edge.
“Kamala has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from prisons and jails and insane asylums and the worst mental institutions anywhere in the world.”
- Oct. 16, 2024, Trump rally in Atlanta
Republicans have a solution, though, and that is voter suppression. This is an emergency! They close polling stations, they redraw districts to favor their own, they purge voter lists with ferocious zeal, and they demand photo ID from those least able to obtain it.
And they have a diabolical way of sowing doubt in the electorate’s mind about the validity of the voting process, insisting that elections can be, in fact, always are, stolen in the event Trump doesn’t win. He’s been laying that groundwork virtually daily from Day One, and even worse than its utter transparency and predictability is its undeniable success.
Republicans confirm your worst fears: that dead dictators are colluding with Hillary Clinton or that Italian satellites are switching votes, or the Chinese have dumped fake ballots, or “illegal” immigrants are voting by the thousands, or that dead people are voting, or that Democratic poll workers are throwing out legitimate votes for him and adding fake votes for the other guy, or that even legitimate voters are voting twice.
When Trump hints that this might be the last election, his supporters are not alarmed. They’re relieved. Frankly, at this point anyone would gladly agree to end elections forever if Trump would just shut the fuck up.
After all, this voting boondoggle is stressful, right? It’s never worked properly, it stinks of fraud and conspiracies, and anyway, Trump was sent by god to fix it, so it is better just to let Trump go ahead and fix it. Whatever you think “it” is.
Leave “democracy” to the experts!
But what about the Supreme Court? I hear no one asking. All of the above has been enabled, while you were sleeping, by Supreme Court rulings that declared unenforceable, in Shelby County vs. Holder (2013), the parts of the Voting Rights Act that required federal approval of any changes to a state’s voting procedures, a rule meant to address historical systemic discrimination against disadvantaged groups; and, in Citizens United vs FEC (2010), removed all limits on donations to political campaigns by corporations and labor unions, ignoring established precedents that had curbed the influence of money.
And I ask you. Seriously. What’s the Constitution all about if it’s not about giving those unwashed, uneducated slave owners the chance to buy elections?
So this is our starting point: picture the typical quiet, “nice” neighbourhood, its “nice, real” Americans waiting in a state of barely controlled terror for the influx of “not nice, not real” Americans who will poison everything with their violence, laziness, drugs, and licentiousness.
Code words like nice neighbourhood are how dominant groups bond over their isms without ever mentioning the ism.
In mere hours, we will enter the outer circuit of hell that is the third “most important election in world history.”
Think back to pre-2016, before the fall. Days were sunny, with cloudy spells. We knew life was irksome and unfair, but we muddled through while our leaders at least pretended to have our backs.
Suddenly there was Trump, his cabinet stuffed with deliriously foul-mouthed right-wingers dedicated to advancing their best interests, not ours. We understood that we were expected to believe what we were told, no matter how preposterous. Where the hell had these people come from? How had our neighbours become our enemies?
When Trump’s in the world, there’s nothing else in the world, and he never ends. He’s the whole enchilada, the Big Mac, the foot-long wiener, and you can taste every insect leg, every cow lip and chicken asshole.
Who has time to pay attention to Ukraine, or North Korea, or Gaza? Not even blood baths distract him or us. They pale next to the “horrible things Democrats have done to this country”, and the “nasty witch hunts he’s endured”. His rallies are giant group therapy sessions, but instead of him helping Americans, you drip sweat as you wrack your brains for new ways to say you love him. He’s the best President since — Presidents — were President!
He’s a master of sweetly smiling torture. Just when you think you’ve heard it all, he sneaks up behind you in your dreams and shouts, “Inject bleach!” He sucks more oxygen out of the room than a Naugahyde sofa that’s caught fire from your cigarette butt. He glows in the dark.
Let’s run through the set-up. Kamala Harris, an appealing, dignified, charismatic woman of color, a warm, generous soul, with a manner that’s approachable, yet no-nonsense, like the most educated soccer mom ever; a woman’s woman with an infectious laugh, steel in her spine and a laser focus on justice and maintaining the rule of law; a former state prosecutor and Attorney General of California and current Vice President — a role in which she is supposed to support the policies of the President, and in which role she has no power to set any agenda of her own — is currently and unbelievably neck and neck with Donald Trump.
He’s a convicted felon, compulsive liar, wannabe autocrat and serial sexual predator, whose business model is simply fraud, and who had zero experience in public office before he snagged the prize, President of the United States, as a white populist male benefitting from a backlash to the first Black president.
Sure, the racism sucks, but he’d be fun to have a beer with! Even substantial numbers of Black men fall under the spell of a sociopath who has them walk on stage to “Dixie” and endure jokes about watermelons.
How astonished are we that they’re tied, which irresistibly reads as moral equivalence? How surprised are we that the one case that was considered a long shot, even dubious, legally — the “hush money” case — succeeded spectacularly with thirty-four felony convictions, but every other case has been willfully delayed, so that he has never had, and may never have, any accountability for
- inciting the January 6th, 2021 insurrection
- conspiring to interfere with the results of the 2020 election whose outcome he refused to accept, and
- his theft and refusal to return hundreds of classified documents, whose contents, including highly sensitive military information, he shared with friends, members of his various clubs, and likely foreign enemy agents?
Trumpism is bigger than one man; his sycophants (basically anyone who’s not Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger) now share spreading the message. Project 2025 is the style guide, the agenda, freed from any one person’s brain, and sent marching into the world. Republicans had been jockeying for control of the Supreme Court for decades, and it came to fruition with Trump, but, to state the obvious, and it’s what I do best, Trump won’t be around forever, but the fallout from Project 2025 might be.
“People come in, they’re very sick. Very sick, They’re coming into our country, they’re very, very sick with highly contagious disease. And they’re let into our country to infect our country.”
Oct. 11, 2024, Trump rally in Aurora, Colo.
Do you remember the first days of his Presidency? No sooner had he opened his mouth than we began gasping and checking our hearing aids, hoping for a malfunction that would explain what he couldn’t possibly have said. After a few more sharp intakes of breath, we stopped looking each other in the eye. Surely he would grow into the role, develop some dignity, learn the ropes, lead!
Imagine our chagrin when we realized we were just Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz on the candy conveyor belt, stuffing an ever-increasing traffic jam of lies, profanities and idiocies down the front of our once pristine uniforms.
Kamala, with her unfortunate choices of being a woman, Black, powerful, and confident, must be questioned, doubted and dismissed, so that even the combined efforts of every supporter can’t validate her.
Did she sleep her way to the top? Is she the ultimate DEI? I mean, what are her policies? When will she do a real interview? Is Tim Walz her handler? Or her pimp? Might she perform oral sex on Hillary? If not, why not? Why can’t she stop the war in Gaza? Do you really think she’s experienced enough to handle this? As experienced as, say, a former reality TV show host with no brains and no experience? Like, that kind of experience?
At his one debate with Harris, Trump, unhinged by her calling his rallies boring and weird, gets weird, but definitely not boring. He screams that Haitian immigrants, legal ones in Springfield, Ohio, are “ eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets!”
J D Vance, whose wife is, I mean, after all, not white, but he still loves her! tells a news anchor that he had to make up stories about cat-eating immigrants, because that’s what it takes to draw attention to the suffering of white people.
Raising that level of awareness? It’s so totally worth kids getting bomb threats at their school. I mean, they already get mass shootings, who would even notice?
“The transgender thing is incredible,” Trump says at a “Moms for Liberty” event. “Think of it; your kid goes to school, and he comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.” Trump repeats this insane lie at multiple rallies. Does anyone question it? (A Black congressman at the Madison Square Garden rally shouts, “I’ll be damned if some teacher’s gonna tell my boys they can be girls!” Because he checked that that’s happening, I guess?)
The final week before the election; time for closing arguments. Trump holds his ultimate rally. The first speaker, a supposed comedian, using pollution as a set up for his joke, reveals that the “floating island of garbage” he referred to is — Puerto Rico! That sure puts the “punch” in punchline.
The Archbishop of Puerto Rico writes an open letter to Trump verifying that his flock are not “garbage”, and demands a personal apology which, at time of writing, is not forthcoming. Trump knows nothing about it.
It reminds me of the time, about two weeks ago, when Trump spoke to the Detroit Economic Club, declaring that, if Kamala Harris won, “The whole country will be like — you want to know the truth? It’ll be like Detroit. Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president.”
You know, and can I just say, seriously. If you want to take Carrie to the prom, you should at least tell her she’s pretty.
Speaker after speaker at the MSG hate-fest vomits up vile nonsense without shame. “Kamala is the Anti-Christ!” “She’s definitely the best Samoan… whatever…. low intelligence Black woman to ever run for President!” “She’s a fraud! A low-life!” “Gaza children are terrorists and Kamala supports them!” “Kamala and her pimp handler…!”
Kamala Harris fearlessly and relentlessly talks abortion and reproductive freedom. She travels the US, gathering stories that tell us how MAGA Republicans and Trump view women. Because of abortion bans, women are dying of sepsis, miscarrying in parking lots, their doctors waiting until they are one step from death to dare to offer treatment. Women are carrying dead or deformed fetuses to term. Some have been raped, some by a family member. Some are rendered permanently infertile. Some do jail time, charged because they miscarried in their own bathroom, at home.
But what is Harris doing about Gaza? She’s already accused of supporting terrorism, just by expressing sorrow at the forty thousand deaths, but sure, kids, cast doubt about her good faith when she is not even in power or setting policies.
What is Kamala Harris doing about Gaza? Getting elected, if you’re lucky, dude.
But back to Nuremberg! “America should be for Americans only!” Stephen Miller thunders. He has a corpse face straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare, and is the great-grandson of Jewish immigrants, so it only makes sense he should mirror Nazi rhetoric from 1939. If he’s the first person you see when you open your eyes, you’re chained to the wall in a basement.
Here’s something new: Will extremists deliver bombs in boxes on election day? Bombs — a dozen roses — which one really says, “I care”?
Election deniers are in charge of certifying the votes in Georgia, and they can refuse to do so on a whim, a suspicion of “irregularity”. Delaying the certification, or a tie vote, could enable the House and the Senate to decide who’s President and Vice President, bypassing the will of the people entirely. It’s very possible.
Elon Musk, “dark gothic Maga”, has a nice sit-down with Tucker Carlson. “Doesn’t it seem strange that no one has tried to kill Harris?” he says, also posting the rhetorical question on X. The Secret Service takes note, because, in fact, there have been numerous arrests after threats to Harris online.
Musk, of course, says it’s a joke. White straight men have the luxury of making and being relaxed about jokes because jokes don’t endanger them. He explains that “there’d be no point in assassinating her, she’s just a puppet.”
Is she? I dunno, is she? Perhaps. But it can’t be. Can it? I dunno. Is it possible that MAGA Republicans know the truth? Are we delusional? Maybe Trump and Tucker and J D and Miller and Stone and Manafort really do know what’s best for everyone. Maybe, as Peter Thiel believes, freedom and democracy are incompatible.
Absolute certainty allied with unlimited power and immunity from prosecution. What could possibly go wrong?
During the days of the Ottawa trucker convoy, which brought chaos and confusion, American style, to our capital city with ridiculous ease, I realized that my safe haven of Canada exists because someone lets us exist. I saw then that we’re the tail that you wag.
There really is only one choice in your election if you are a decent person: renounce American citizenship and come to Canada.
If you’re European, no one will care. If you’re not, you’ll be accused of causing everything from the affordable housing crisis to inflation, but never to your face. You’ll also be buying milk in plastic bags.
If you can’t quite stick any of that, vote Kamala.
If you turn out to be dangerous idiots (by considering Trump the best choice) or despicable self-righteous hard-liners (by thinking that Harris supports genocide in Gaza, holding her responsible for Biden’s inaction and handing Trump victory through protest votes), you will unleash forces you clearly do not understand.
And sooner or later, across your northern border, the forty-ninth parallel, the longest undefended border in the world that once represented our unbreakable bonds of friendship, the tanks will come rolling into Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary… The world will grind to a halt, then begin to spin in a different direction.
I plan to take no hostages.
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Originally published at https://slowpainful.com on October 31, 2024.
