Strange vibes from the final hours of the 2024 Presidential Election.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The Ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats, ‘Second Coming’
I’m not going to question how we got here, because I was there. I lived it. I covered it. I tried as I might to make sense of it. I failed. Ultimately, I believe, we have failed – as a nation, as a society, as a people. We should not be standing before a 50/50 choice for president of the United States with a domestic terrorist, traitor, convicted fraudster and sexual assaulter, and failed mogul and politician printed on our ballots. Not even in my most cynical nightmares could I have conjured such a fate for America, after how I grew up, when I grew up, after civil rights, after women’s rights, gay rights, ecological advancements, artistic revolution, technological dawns, and all the progress against the things he stands for – bigotry, jingoism, misogyny, anger, and grievance. I have seen politicians ruined and sent packing for far less than what seethes from his torment daily. I have seen the Fourth Estate step up and call truth to power and our institutions stand strong for what is right and true in the democratic spirit, but that is all gone now, this early November, whether we defeat Donald J. Trump and his minions of divisiveness and spite and vindictiveness and pettiness or not. We have allowed this to linger and be a part of our construct. It is deep in our DNA now, along with the past that haunts us to this day. For that, no matter the outcome, we have lost.
I do not mean to shade an extremely important election today, as we stand on the precipice of sending the first ever woman to the highest office. Woefully behind as we are to countries around the world who’ve surpassed this mark, it is a glorious thing to behold – that the other part of that 50/50 is Kamala Harris, the first woman elected as vice president of these United States four years ago, and it is, for all the women in my life (even those who are voting the other way), and my wife and my daughter, a historic leap into a new century. It is right and serendipitous that a woman –especially a woman of color with origins from varying cultures – stands as our dividing line between political Armageddon and a brighter, saner future. It is damn irony, in fact, that she might be the female bulwark that did not materialize when all this mayhem was loosed on the body politic eight years ago. She is poised, has run a magnificent campaign, and gets no complaints here, as I had with Hillary Clinton’s missteps. Harris has done all that she could, and with a little over 100 days in which to do it, to be thrown as she was into this cauldron, she has performed more than admirably. I would write today, spectacularly.
No, it is not for her achievements and efforts, her supporters and those who have toiled with such heroic gusto to save us from ourselves for which I mourn today. I wonder with all of the time and research and education and experience behind me why we have sent such a flawed and terrible man to represent two of our major political parties, who endeavored to circumvent our most sacred duties as Americans, casting a vote for the candidate we wish to lead us, and then to defraud and lie and castigate and cause chaos to deny it and deny us. All the time unleashing dozens of people to commit crimes – fake electors, flimsy lawsuits, “find me votes” in Georgia, meaningless recounts in Arizona, pressuring his vice president to commit treason. And when it all failed, calling a mob to the Capitol and riling them up with vicious rhetoric that led to an attack on our elected officials, our vice president, and speaker of the house, to desecrate the center of our democracy, a building that – for good or ill – represents the church of what we hold most dear. To give him a chance, a sniff at this office again, is a pox on the soul of this nation.
I am sincerely and sadly sorry for having to state that today, but it is true.
And as I have written in this space now for nearly three decades and lived most of my adult life, I repeat the mantra of the great Lenny Bruce, who said time and again that there is the world we wish could be, we want it to be, and maybe should be, and then there is the one that is. In that world, Donald Trump can very well be president once again today… if we vote for him, and nearly half the nation will. It will be close, and it will be as if there was no January 6 and that he still says he did not lose and never handed over power as George Washington did, peacefully. He never conceded, nor did he come to the inauguration of his successor, or do anything befitting the office he seeks today. He besmirched it and our nation, and we must strive today to see that he does not have that chance again.
But, he does, and it is a 50/50 chance.
As it was in the smoldering summer of 1776 and through the ensuing brutal winters and bloody battles and terrible upheaval and slavery and insurrection and Civil War and World Wars and suffrage all the rest, it is us, the people, who are left to make it right. Our courts have failed. Our press has failed. The Republican Party failed. They could have nominated anyone but an anti-American fascist criminal, but they did not. Our institutions, too, have been hijacked and left wanting, asleep at the wheel, intimidated or stoic or crippled in inertia. They all have a hand in this national sin.
What of half of our vox populi? What of their voice, their ignoring of this virus? As the Republican nominee speaks of sending snipers to fire on the press, jailing opponents, dismantling the constitution, and filling his cabinet and his state department and the justice department with sycophants and thugs? His final plea to the people was a hate-filled rally of mutants who only wish to tear at our fabrics – not strengthen them – for his own ends, his own gain, his own trifling vengeance.
This should not be the choice, but I can hear Lenny now; “It is, Campion. It is.”
And that is why I weep for this country today, no matter the outcome of this election. It should not have come to this, but it did. Someday, with the benefit of hindsight, we may have answers that allude us now to why this happened and how it has transpired against all reason. Today, however, I had a duty to express my horror that we are here, to make sure we take a moment to look in the mirror and conjure our excuses. to be faced with this terror again.
And hope it does not swallow us whole.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
