Last Thoughts On the All Of It

If I were you, I wouldn’t bother reading this. Seriously, who wants to waste their precious time with another article about the election? Not me or rather, not I. In fact, I’m on a twelve-step program trying to withdraw, but I’m only up to step three or four. It’s so hard.

When I look at a piece of Kleenex, I not only see a pristine, fluffy white tissue, so perfect in dimension, so sublime in texture and virginal, instead I see rectilinear Pennsylvania. As I hold it in my two hands, I am gripping Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and blowing into the red, rural middle. This has to stop.

What would Wordsworth do in times like this? Wander lonely as a cloud? I’d much rather be a swinger of branches in Frost’s birches. In his poem, the boy climbs to the top knowing to descend to the ground. There is no place better. So it is, I am earthbound, wondering how we have come to the brink.

Here’s my theory: We suffer from electile dysfunction. We go limp in November. Maybe his red tie arouses. MAGA’s appeal is directed to the glands rather than our brains. Their mendacity is a perverse aphrodisiac. Their repeated lies are a siren-song. If this were Masterpiece Theater we’d be witnessing Downstairs voting for Upstairs. The underserved identify with the privileged.

Americans are world-class consumers. We acquire and we think like consumers which is to say we really don’t think much at all. We vote the same way we buy a car. Not for its carbon footprint, or safety or economy so much as the cluster of images attached to the commercial. When new pharmaceuticals are advertised on T.V., we are seduced by the accompanying montage of family picnics or robust bodies even as the adverse side effects are being recited. The substance gets lost.

Ironically, we grow cynical at the same time. We know, on some level, we are being conned, but we have grown to accept that as being the way things are. Decisions are made by skimming the surface. Woe is we.