This morning I woke up and approached my smartphone in the same manner that people open cellar doors in horror films. In actual fact, I couldn’t bring myself to open the phone and my youngest daughter was the first to wave a visual map of America stained red under my nose.
I am neither religious or American, but I was, and still am praying for a victory for Biden/Harris (whether my religious convictions last beyond that, they certainly won’t under any Trump administration). At the time of writing, the orange man had falsely and inevitably declared victory long before any clear picture has formed.
Halloween wasn’t canceled — they just moved it forward three days and amplified the horror. Why else invite a mad king back to the throne if you had a chance to pitch him headfirst into the dung heap of history where he belongs?
The next days of fear, loathing and dread will tell.
If one thing is totally clear, it is the fallaciousness of hope as a vehicle forward towards a more progressive and enlightened future. You’d be just as wise to clutch a handful of posies under your nose hoping them to keep you from the plague.
If one thing is totally clear, it is the virus-like grip that one man has over the Republican party, certain social media and a significant cohort of white America.
The art of the deal here is that there is no deal. America got jacked and so did the party — take it or leave it, the virus won. It transmitted itself through a verbally abusive, dystopian fear-mongering, lie, meme and rumour-generating circus of right wing religious mad ass-hattery and balls-out dick waving idiocy.
It’s extremely infectious — follow the science and you will know the code for this virus was already written in the 1920s when America really fell in love with advertising and a vision of a bigger brighter version of itself. Bruce Barton’s 1925 book comparing religion and business, The Man Nobody Knows, declared Jesus Christ’s parables as “the most powerful advertisements of all time…. He would be a national advertiser today.”
Look at the American Evangelical movement and know that statement to be true. The other virus ravaging the world at the time was dubbed the Spanish Flu — but it also originated in America and infected the world.
America, now a century older has both the old virus and a new imported one too. The prognosis for the patient is bleak — particularly if it has underlying conditions like endemic racism, massive unemployment, inequality, chronic greed, hypocrisy and finally, indifference to its own fate.
America if you weren’t played the first time, you soon will be if the orange man wins in the next days. Those first four years were just a dress rehearsal. American carnage and Salem’s witch trials await you.
But in all this madness, and while I feel mighty dread at the prospect of watching America (and regrettably much of the civilized world with it) slide into an authoritarian shithole car crash of its own making, life on the planet will continue — long after humans in all their wisdom and stupidity have left this planet permanently — by whirlwind, rapture, rocket or virus.
In the meantime, take pleasure in the simple things; the solace of nature and animals, the love of family and friends, celebrations of human kindness and connection and compassion for all life.
These items are not for sale.
Hope is the last thing to die, but sometimes it does. We must make accommodation for this and live accordingly.
