November 8th

In 1956 my presidential vote went for Adlai Stevenson. The first of many losers. My association with subsequent second Tuesdays in November is that of a wake; sort of an extension of Halloween or The Day of the Dead.  A time for keening.

(Cheer up, Norm, there are always those calendar scenes of Switzerland)

Given my history of disappointments, I cannot remember a time when an election was so consequential, felt viscerally in my psyche and in my bones.  And an off-year yet. Since Trump uncaged the beast, fissures in our midst have exposed seemingly irreconcilable tectonic plates. A quake is headed our way with numbers off the Richter Scale. November 8^th will be a plebiscite on the good sense or lunacy of American people. Never before have so many fallen so fast and so far. I’m cushioning myself against the turning off of lamps in this once beacon of a country. We might as well dismantle the Statue of Liberty.

One wonders how to rehabilitate seventy million fools. In Hitler Germany there were an inordinate number of PhDs in the Gestapo. Go figure. Somehow, they collectively lost their mind and later underwent an agonizing reappraisal. I leave that subject of mob psychology to sociologists, historians and psychopathologists.

Today we are faced with an army of the disgruntled. Is no one gruntled anymore? I would imagine everyone has grievances. You lost your free pass to the car wash or your shoelace just busted and your stretch socks are disappearing into your shoes. Get a grip; that’s no reason to vote for the guy with a satchel full of hokum.

Richard Nixon’s famous last words as the helicopter whisked him away were, I’m not a crook. Donald is such a miscreant he proudly proclaims, I am a crook, a liar and a cheat and you’re going to vote for my partners in crime anyway. And they do, to show those loathsome Democrats how much they are hated even if it means the end of Social Security, Medicare, civility and sanity. Some of us remember how Joseph Welch muzzled Joe McCarthy with five words, Have you no decency, Senator? As a measure of their depravity, those words would have no weight today.

Looking back at my sixty-six years as a voter I can own up to at least one moment of wrong-headedness. I cast my lot with Eugene McCarthy rather than Hubert Humphrey in 1968. In those good old days we had to deal with the evil of two lessers. Humphrey lost the popular vote by less than 1% but was soundly beaten in electoral votes. Hubert, by the way, was a pharmacist but one shouldn’t hold that against him. McCarthy ended up losing his way when he supported Reagan in 1980. I can now proclaim I was wrong. We are entitled to one stumble every six decades.

We seem to have lost our Middle of the Roaders.  The independent Middle was always a muddle. Now we see many of those who called the Middle their address drift over to the red pole for simplistic answers to the complex issues. Count the cynics with the cowards. It is far too easy to sit this one out. Abdication of rationality must be part of our DNA. Here Daddy, tell me what to do. There is a strain of infantilism running through the electorate.  

What to do? Listen to the flowers? Eat ourselves to pumpkin bliss? Find transport in Chopin’s Nocturnes or Whistler’s Nocturnes or see if you can get Keats to rhyme with Yeats? I Ain’t Got Nothin But the Blues, sang Mose Allison. A bluesy sax shows me the way to get out of this world / cause that’s where everything is.

I do have a modest proposal in advance of the 2024 election. Since California, New York and other states are so heavily Blue, why not organize a legion of 500,000 from those places to relocate into gerrymandered districts in Red states and tilt the balance in our favor? Let our surplus popular vote count!

Here I am at the bottom of the page bereft of any other bright ideas. I ventilate instead. For those who expected wisdom you are eligible for double your money back.