I took the bait
A week of thinking, a day of drinking, and a moment of doubt.
What follows is a post-election breakdown / justification / struggle-bus session I had with myself. I figured I would share it with folks (not sure who), and as a designer this is the language of my people, infographics.
I decided to vote for the first time in my life at 47.
The general embarrassment and frustration I felt watching the results come in, and the discourse I heard in the week that followed made me want to look deeper.
Proceed at your own risk / leisure.
I have magical thinking, piss poor memory, write incomprehensively, and was given a public school education.
You have been warned.
Your Narrator
I am kind of a both and neither person. While I have several close longtime friends, I also have a wide collection of second circle friends who wander in and out of my life. The thing both groups have in common is that I am a one on one friend. Almost none of my friends are friends with each other. It might sound like I am living separate lives or a shape changer, but if you asked any of them about me you would get a very similar description I wager.
“I am accepted in both sietch and village”
DR. LIET KYNES - Imperial Judge of the Change
About this guy:
I grew up poor, and barely noticed. By the time I became the second person in my family ever to graduate high school my dad had been gone for a decade and the two men who attempted to fill the role had moved on. We had lived in 6 different houses, with brief stints of me staying with family wherever, all within a 20 mile radius. As the school put it at the time I was “Not College Bound”. I started working at 13 in construction with family members and later in food service. I would eventually end up in the Army to avoid rapid onset alcoholism, but washed out after 6 months of training for the infantry due to a busted up knee and wonky spine. I eventually would end up living in the same 20 mile radius from where I grew up, unemployed and spending a lot of time on the internet.
About this guy:
Thanks to some inspiration from a teacher in an “Education for Employment” program in high school I had developed an interest in computers and design. I moved to a bigger town and away from the gravity of my family background, I wore a lot of black, drank a lot of coffee, and barely slept. With the help of a roommate and his computer I hatched a plan to make a living doing design of any kind, essentially to avoid becoming the nearly crippled men I grew up around. I started small at print and sign shops, built up a client list comprised of small businesses and large companies as an independent. Eventually I would end up in a design department for a publicly traded company. I lived in Chicago and was paying more in taxes than my sister made per year after working 30 years with a grocery store chain.
The Past, and How it Busta Rhymes
There have been 8 elections since I was old enough to vote. They are as follows with the general vibes I associate with them in retrospect. Again, back before it was mandatory to have a political stance, I could barely water my field of fucks with few exceptions, so your results may vary.
I was in highschool at the time, and to be fair to myself I had some stuff going on so I barely even noticed. Clinton played the saxophone at some point in the past and was talking about his underwear on Mtv so I reckon I thought he was “cool” or something. He won, and it wasn’t close. A lot of folks think Perot had once again cost team red the election. That pesky third party had become a problem for team red, but team blue would get their own “spoiler” soon enough.
My second election was Bush / Gore 00’ and at the time I was actually at Ft. Benning, Georgia literally in the middle of infantry training having enlisted in mid 99’. Here is where I am unclear if I voted or not. That time is pretty blurry generally speaking when it came to anything but training, but I do recall being given a choice between voting or doing KP (Kitchen Patrol i.e. cleaning the dining facility) so maybe I voted.
What I do remember fairly well is that leading up to it, the Lewinsky scandal had happened, Clinton was impeached, and there was a LOT of castigating and pearl clutching coming from team red. Discussions about morality, and all that were really common and the religious folks saw an opening to start jamming their claws into people’s lives since we had all seen the illustration of the “decadence” of team blue they had been bitching about since he talked about his underwear. That bit had very little effect on the way team blue saw things, but team red was interested in the proposition of a moral high-ground. There was a lot gesturing toward the church, though to be fair, no one really considered Bush as much of a Jesus man. He played the part as best he could.
It was the “dangling chad” election, it was super close and iit made a lot of folks pissed. I think this is where my brain started recording the world around me, because I remember team blue being pretty pissed at their new spoiler Nader. I feel like both team red and team blue made a pact at that point to figure out how to keep that shit at a minimum from now on.
Post 9/11 obviously a LOT of things had changed. The country was still skittish after 9/11, the wars had kicked off, there was still a lot of butt hurt around the last election, and even more butt hurt creeping in about the lack of WMD’s and “mission accomplished” and the Patriot act was about as popular as freedom fries I think. There were definitely a lot of haters for Bush at this point, I remember old heads permanently protesting in front of the courthouse downtown. The phrase “never change horses midstream” did a lot of work to get the wobbly folks to the finish line for the president. Also team red and blue had figured out that if you make third party folks look like a clown car of unserious morons it was pretty easy to keep their effect to a minimum so it’s not like there were other options on the table either.
And here is where things get relevant. I had not voted through all of this stuff, but for the first time it had crept into my head as something I should do. Pretty much all my friends were team blue and were in college, they saw the way the country was getting more and more controlling and that was just not their jam. Bush and his whole team were like an A-Team of fascists and corporate shills, and the potential damage they could do to all our liberties seemed infinite to them. This was the message I heard from many of them all day, and I didn’t have much reason to doubt it. But also, I had other shit going on and I didn’t need a hobby like politics to go with it. I had a bunch of justifications for not getting involved. The previously mentioned votes being meaningless, now backed by the election that was pure bullshit to my eyes.
The people representing both sides being generally unpleasant to talk to at the time, including my friends. So to me the LAST thing I wanted to do is go out, cast a ballot and be directly associated with this crazy shit. I did not want to be a member of either group that would have me or some such. I didn’t know what was gonna happen, but it FELT like the tide was so strong against Bush that it would be impossible for him to win. I got the gist from my friends that they were a part of a movement, and in my world it seemed like that movement was gonna tip the cart over on Bush and we would go back to situation normal like it was back in the Clinton days.
What I failed to take into account was that a second term is a form of mandate. It says to those in power, we agree to let you off the hook for what has gone on that we didn’t like, promise to be good and we will go along. But this time around the red team had 4 years getting their sea legs, and essentially assurance that there was nothing for any of them personally to worry about since it was going to be over for them after the next election anyways. It gave them a combo of experience and a lack of responsibility for an entire 4 years, and their followers would emulate that kind of vibe right along next to them.
The next 4 years were… not fun.
I am obviously not good at the history thing but I bet you can google up “bush second term” or some shit and see some compelling stories about how much impact that had on the world we live in. Whether you see it as good or bad, you have to agree fun was not a part of it.
By the time Obama came around I was outie 5000 on the whole concept of politics. From all accounts Bush and Co. had run a savage burn on us, and basically we let it happen. There was plenty of blame to go around, but generally my take was we (I) did this to myself, and we get what we deserve. But I had this lingering thought in my head that even though my vote was meaningless, maybe it was the gesture that was important. I had this idea that if I were ever going to vote in an election after all that, the person I would vote for would be someone I would be willing to personally endorse. Lesser of two evils shit seemed ridiculous to me.
Obama was interesting culturally but the things he was saying was pretty similar to what McCain was saying, just with different inflection. I was pretty gorked out and “whatever” was fine with me. People were happy when Obama won, and that basically solved my problem. It was back to the salad days of Clinton-eske culture and such that I could easily ignore and get on with life.
I am confident this election happened, outside of that I can not say.
I hadn’t had another political thought until the run up to this election, and when I did have that thought it wasn’t by choice. Given my already aloof, disinterested, and fuzzy view of politics the thought of Trump running for president seemed like performance art to me. “WWF Trump? The Apprentice Trump? LOL!”. Clearly this guy wasn’t gonna make the cut. I didn’t vote. When he won it was all hilarious to me. It was not hilarious, I discovered, to anyone else I knew. I didn’t even know it was election night and was hammered off my ass in Chicago. I was in a bar around closing time when it became clear he was gonna be the guy. People were crying at the bar. Over an election.
In my whiskey soaked brain, I chalked it up to tired drunk people blowing out the lines. People cry over football at bars, so it made sense. But the crying didn’t stop like it normally did when the “fuck-off-and-go-home” music and lights kicked in. It kept going. And going, and going, days and weeks. When that wasn’t working there was the protesting. The resistance. The rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. Then there was the rage of not “being heard” and many of the people I knew were losing their minds over everything the guy did. Little things became big things, people were… having a moment.
Later the pandemic hit... it didn’t help.
Like many others, my brain was out of service when election time came around. The previous year in October, my cat Nixon had died. He was the love of my life. I didn’t take it well.
Everywhere I looked in my apartment reminded me of his absence and apparently there was no amount of booze or purchasing of baubles that could distract me. I tried getting into the early pandemic hobbies of PPE, baking, watching graphs of the death count and reading academic papers on the 3nm scale and how that matters with viruses. Nothing was doing it.
The pandemic had forced my employer to make official what was already a habit, remote work. So that didn’t exactly help the state I was in, and access to being quietly drunk around people had been all but eliminated. I was done with Chicago.
It was time to go home.
The Odyessy
There was a window between lockdown 1 and 2, and I shot my shot. It was a harrowing experience securing a U-Haul and then single handedly moving my entire apartment, furniture and all, down from the 3rd floor. It was made all the more frustrating that there were all these Covid restrictions and “guidelines” that were strictly adhered to by just about every human I ran into during the process. I had worries that I might not even be allowed to cross state borders on my way home.
Fun fact; I was all ready to sign a lease to another house. But the morning after I got lease the landlord wrote me back to tell me they were “turning people back” at a checkpoint coming into town. Which is understandable really. It was a little town way up north I had visited a few times and I wagered they were inundated with assholes like me fleeing from cities desperate to walk outside and drink an occasional beer.
Moving from Chicago to Michigan all by myself was difficult. Doing so in the brief intermission between the first and second lockdown, was damn near impossible. But given my mental state at the time, I would have set everything I own on fire, quit my job, and walked back to Michigan if that is what it took. Luckily, it only took 36 sleepless hours and more yelling at people than I am ever comfortable with.
I got pretty misty eyed as I rolled the Uhaul into the driveway of my new place, but you might just chalk that up to exhaustion.
The year that followed was possibly one of the best years of my life. I feel no shame for saying it. I could write a book on it, but needless to say it was a return to who I thought I was at my core and a much needed break from the outer world. The pandemic was largely a reality show to me, and while I did feel bad for people, it felt like it was happening on a different planet entirely.
Little House on The Prairie
I had the luxury of avoiding the madness of the Floyd riots in Chicago, and barely took notice of the circus around January 6th. I was on my island, so even the continuing lockdowns and restrictions didn’t apply to me. When I started to pay attention to things again I started feeling a bit woozy about it all. So much suffering and hatred and I couldn’t really tease out what was real and what was the lens of the internet distorting what I was seeing.
I was hearing very conflicting accounts from my friends still in Chicago. The people I worked with said everything was fine and the news was just blowing it out of proportion. The people I had drank with were telling me the businesses were all closing down, and crime had gone bonkers. I don’t doubt the accuracy of either of these accounts, these were people I knew well after all. But what was troubling is that both sets of folks were essentially neighbors to one another. If not in actual home location, certainly in that they both spent the bulk of their day in the downtown area.
Fun fact; About the “front line workers” phrase. When I came back home during the Xmas exodus while training in the Army, I started hearing the phrase “thank you for your service”. That phrase immediately put me on edge for some reason. I had done nothing to be thanked for personally, but also it felt like an apology.
It sort of became an insult when I went back to training. A guy would pull off some high-speed performance on a PT test or in a field exercise and you would say “thank you for your service” to bring him down a peg.
Anyway, it stuck with me. What were they apologizing for? Later I would see what happened to a lot of my buddies and god knows how many other service members post 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq. None of it happened to me as I was out of it by then with my bum knee and damaged self-worth, as is a trend in my life, lucking out of a bad deal. But when I started hearing “front line workers” my gut told me these people were about to get fucked.
They always build you up before they push you out in front, is something I have heard said before.
Anywho, about my two sets of friends back in Chicago. It only took about a year for the two sides to start converging.
My work friends started complaining about the state of things in almost the exact way my drinking friends had in the past. They did it privately, but it was almost identical. The main difference is that my drinking friends had totally moved on from being good blue team members. After a year of screaming about shit being bad, they had decided to look elsewhere for answers. Both of these sets of people started out on team blue, more or less. When you live in a place like Chicago, it is basically part of the air you breathe. But by the time year three had rolled around almost none of them were team blue anymore. My work friends had either given up entirely on the political idea, and my drinking friends were by and large team Trump, begrudgingly or otherwise.
It was about here I knew team red was going to win. Importantly, I also thought my guides around voting still held true. It would all come out in the wash. America was gonna say “get fucked” and a reset would happen. It wasn’t going to be an election about Biden, Kmala, or even Trump. It was going to be an election about the parties and the flavor of bullshit they make you tolerate.
Crouching Hubris, Hidden Hubris
The red team was a shell of its former self. Trump had tipped over the cart on them and after they finally accepted him as the new boss, he shit the bed on Jan. 6th and made that new direction a long walk off a short pier.
They essentially began an apology tour post Trump. Old head republicans were coming out and trying to illustrate that they were never on board with him, and suggesting that things were going back to normal. Trump had so completely decimated their political power, they were essentially going to have to beg team blue for table scraps for the next decade at least.The republicans were done. Trump was vanquished, de-twittered and building a closet to cry into over on Truth Social.
Player 2 has Left the game
If there is one hot take amongst many herein that I will stand by no matter what, it is this: Never underestimate liberals’ ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
For reasons mysterious to me still, team blue and the media decided to pull Trump back into the public eye. Congress was spinning up a stage adaptation of Jan. 6th the musical. Democrat leadership was suing Trump for whatever they could. And to me worst of all, media folks thirsting for the ratings and views of the resistance era gone by were now saying his name more than ever, and with more froth than they had when he was actually in office.
This may be what drew in not only my drinking friends, but my work friends as well. The year that led up to the election was like a never ending competition between who could torpedo team blue faster. The democrats and their allies seemed hell bent on winning that contest. They seemed to want to prove to their voters by deed and creed that no matter what, you could count on them to bend you over, and you should thank them for it.
Had team blue maintained their standard level of choking, it would have been enough on its own to hand team red a narrow victory. But if you are going biff it, biff it all the way. Things like inflation, flirting with world war 3, the response to October 7th and the ensuing protests. The various identity politics issues that were driving normal people insane, and fucking up entire families.
Both barrels, all the time, straight to your face. But what really helped them run their own table was when a crack in the door opened for people to start saying what they had been thinking for years now. To report some reality that was obvious to anyone looking.
God save the King, Yaaas Queen!
The 4 week period at the end of June and start of July allowed some of their people in the media a little wiggle room when it came to The Narrative. First Trump was nearly killed. To me the election really ended there. If anything is assured to bring out the voters of a party, it’s when someone tries to kill their guy. In what was supposed to be another nail biter election, that is all team red needed to win. However it was the weeks that followed that would really run up the score.
After the the media tossed out a slew of gibberish to downplay the assassination attempt, “was he ACTUALLY shot?” “was it REALLY politically motivated?”, they basically all stopped talking about it at the same time. It was stunning how many times I heard the phrase “Crazy how Trump nearly getting killed a week ago isn’t the craziest thing about this election!?” or something similar come out of political pundits. But to many red team members it was, and remains THE craziest thing amongst some stiff competition in their eyes. But the grey goose got well and truly cooked at the debate.
“I really don't know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don't think he knows what he said either.”
In real time many of those still loyal to team blue witnessed just how far the Democrats were willing to test their ability to gaslight the American public. If anything qualifies as a “the emperor has no clothes” moment, it is the first commercial break of that debate. Even the most staid and ardent blue team apperatchiks of the media were speaking in tongues about what they had just seen with their own eyes. Uncle Joe had left the building, and one could wonder if he ever actually entered it at all.
After the debate mercifully ended, they did their best to claw back that collective gasp. But it was too late. All it did was build a better and better case for normal American’s to tell them to kick rocks.
The desperation became comical, if satire was dead, its dried out corpse was twirling around in its grave.
Some Highlights:
Defending democracy by annointing a replacement for a sitting (and uncooperative) president behind closed doors.
Suing and fighting to allow or deny candidates from ballots nation wide depending on their needs.
Refusing to acknowledge that men and women are in fact different, yet actively pursuing voters along the lines of gender.
Begging for Israel to get cut off, while insisting continued support of Ukraine.
“Man Enough.”
Hiding from the press.
Hiding from the press harder.
Nazis take NY!
Muh Disinformation.
... and Manny Moore!
For me personally, given my history the big one was the apparent political draft night that happened in the closing month or so.
Team blue traded Elon Musk, a Kennedy, and Tulsi Gabbard for The Cheneys and a political poison to be named later. It was a breathtaking display of own goals, but to be fair to them I am unsure they even knew what game they were playing, let alone which end of the field they were shooting for.
“Ok, SO?” You may be asking at this point. What’s the problem, why are you sad balls.
I am upset because I flinched.
Stupid is as stupid does
I am consistently doubtful when it comes to my ability to know the right answer in almost every aspect of life. I was sorta raised by wolves, and when I look at how my life ultimately turned out I feel about as responsible for it, good or bad, as I do for the weather.
I am bad at math, my logic is truly of the fuzzy variety, and I sorta stopped reading 20 years ago. My memory is so poor that you can generally convince me of anything if you just toss a date in there.
However, if there is one area that I feel in my bones I understand its people, and specifically Americans. This has allowed me to survive in a world I am hilariously unqualified for. My sort of instinctual understanding of what it is to be a human on this rock.
Not to say I am “good with people”, actually far from it. Half the people I meet have a kind of ick response to me. It takes a whole hell of a lot on my part to convince them to give me a shot. More often than not it’s more than I care to attempt. But generally speaking when I meet someone, I know where they are coming from, no matter the velocity or angle. Whether I like the cut of their jib or not, I understand. Well, except people who are into feet… I still don’t get that.
What I am saying is that the week leading up to the election I had doubts, and they were fundamental ones. We all have doubts, and most people tend to tamp them down and ultimately go with their gut. I certainly try to consider my doubts, but by habit I almost never ACT on my doubts.
“A case can be made…” is the battle-cry of the masturbatory dilettante mid-wit
For various reasons, by the time election day came I had 99.99% convinced myself that not only was this a close election, but if this election went the other way there was no avoiding direct responsibility for what followed.
While generally, statistically, a vote is meaningless, I do live in Michigan. According to the current count Trump won by something like 80,000 votes. It's a low effect granted, but at the time I had this irrational fear it would end up in the courts and it would start looking like 1 in 10,000 or 5,000 or some crazy shit. But I suppose most important was that I had a crisis of faith when it came to Americans.
Head Cannon Fodder
After all that above, let me display the thoughts and thinking (or failure to think) I took with me to the bar election day morning. This narrative I gave myself, and a significant about of alcohol convinced me to vote for the first time. I am not saying it would work on everyone, but it got me there. I am nothing if not irrationally attached to the idea of not voting at this point in life. The novelty of a streak has inheirant value to me good or bad.
I will try to be broad strokes here, as anyone actually looking at whatever this is has to be damn near suicidal by this point in the journey. I am certainly way over it, but I had to work it out somehow, so you are welcome and I am sorry.
The Framework:
An incomplete list of how I understand America and it’s politics.
America needs two healthy, and distinct political parties at a minimum.
The system being slow is a feature, not a bug. Chill out.
When the media stops reporting shit, you are gonna have a bad time.
When someone says they are saving you from something, that someone is the something.
If you are surrounded by assholes, talk to one of them to see if you are an asshole as well.
History doesn’t repeat, but we try to reboot it every chance we get.
“Leave me the fuck alone.” Is the American creed, the rest is downstream of that.
You have to feed something into the machine to get the magical thinking to kick in. So to that end I had this premise. I honestly don’t know where it came from, other than to say we all make connections where none might exist. I am pretty good at this.
The Premise:
Today’s blue team is the late 90’s red team, boosted by the speed and stupidity of the internet.
A term of “normal” politics, that weren’t quite normal.
The media helped those in power until it became unprofitable / too obvious.
Instead of 9/11 to instigate a permanent state of exception you got Covid.
Blaming the immigrants is still an alarmingly popular past-time, second only to blaming Jews.
Instead of Christian zealots and freedom fries, you have the church of woke and paper straws.
People who used to be funny stopped being funny, and people who were funny started to be a threat.
Celebrities regained their rightful place as people to be ridiculed.
Protesting is great, until it isn’t.
Both have presidents who seem unlikely to be the masterminds behind running the country into the ground.
The Cheneys
Underwear and their contents, still pretty interesting.
The fight against mis/dis/mal information on the internet smells like The Patriot Act 2.0 incoming.
Covid and mass illegal immigration will be as bad for regular Americans as the financial crisis.
No one will face the consequences for either, and fortunes were made.
A significant portion of the electorate lost faith in the elections, for not entirely dismissable reasons.
We saw a lot of people we all thought died years ago.
Some of those people need to take the hint.
So at long last, after a bloodymary, 5 All Day IPA’s, a Corona, and 2 medically questionable neat Macallan’s I grabbed my shit and walked up the block to the church where said performance was to be made.
It was about 2pm I estimate, and I was so hammered, so early, that I think people assumed I was mentally challenged. Which is to say they were incredibly nice and vaguely condescending to me, from what little I could understand.
I did the deed.
Fun fact; From here on out if I ever hear of people getting confused about how to do the vote thing I am going to call bullshit. I wandered home and passed out on the couch waking up some 6 hours later. I pissed syrup, and drank enough Gatorade to earn an honorary sponsorship. If I can do it in that state and you can’t while sober, maybe voting just isn’t for you.
I voted for Trump, wasted a perfectly good buzz, and can never again say “I don’t vote”. It mattered, not one bit. You are welcome America. The End.
I think you are a lot better writer than you give yourself credit for. Of course I'm not much of a writer myself, and I've had 30 more years than you to get there! You do know how to tell a good story, and it's obvious that you've read a lot.
"...When someone says they are saving you from something, that someone is the something...."
You have a gift, my friend -- this is a laugh out loud line....(amongst many many other good ones.)