In one way, that America's future shall be decided only three days from now is almost otherworldly in my mind. The evil that stalks this Election Day I have waged battle against for nearly 10 years on this site. The wretched being imbued with that evil has become a most unwelcome guest in my brain; he's been present every bloody day of every year.
Why does an otherworldliness haunt me? November 5th 2024 might become a massively inflated repetition of 8 August 1974. On that blessed day, Richard Nixon was no more. He too had afflicted the nation with his own brand of evil, and for far longer than 10 years. Then, poof, he was gone.
His sudden absence briefly marooned political columnists and cartoonists on an isle of desperation and the most peculiar kind of sorrow. Who, what, of Nixon's enormously wicked magnitude could ever replace him?
The malign s.o.b. virtually wrote the columnists' columns themselves and he offered himself up for daily cartoon ridicule; in both journalistic fields, the often burdensome pursuit of fresh, engrossing material had been vastly, beautifully attenuated. Yet of a sudden it all vanished. What, they asked themselves, would we political observers, we who observe for a living, now do without Dick?
And here we are again, almost. Like my predecessors of Nixonian yore, already I'm sweating the looming spectre of a post-Trump world. This is a world of fantasy for now; it assumes Donald J. will poof be gone as Dick once was. Naturally, this imagined Trump-vacated world will nonetheless be packed every day for months afterward with ... Trump. He'll still be around, whining and bitching and protesting the sweeping victory stolen from him.
This grinding, seemingly unending future I envision as a kind of methadone for those of us who've been hopelessly hooked on the national narcotic of Trumpism; writing about it daily, or rather, having him write the stuff for us. This period of getting clean and sober, rehabilitation and full recovery — with Donald here but not really there — will be us writers' way of easing off from the harder substance. The period may seem unending, but it will pass.
For a while, it may even be uglier than the Trumpism we've been shooting up our veins for years. That spectre, played out, is unknowable. On occasion I have, however, staked out the position that a post-5 November American Armageddon of sorts will not materialize, and I have given the reasons for that position.
Namely, Trump hasn't the numerical troops necessary for such a national eruption. His devoted shopkeepers and others of likeminded Trumpian ignorance will be less devoted to the idea of taking up arms against the rather better-armed United States government. Also, the J6 convictions and imprisonments of hundreds have since dampened the yearning for violence among those otherwise inclined.
Trump may call for a civil war, and I've no doubt his Twitter blockheads and others of social media "influence" will be all for a national uprising. But you won't see Charlie Kirk or Benny Johnson or Vivek Ramaswamy out there on the streets, AK-47s thrown over their shoulders. They'll stick to their laptops, and I pray they will write items of criminal incitement that could toss them as well into a federal hoosegow.
I have circumscribed this post with the eager, and indescribably anxious, notion of a Trump loss. On this day, three days before the election, I see no point in again conceiving the insufferable alternative, much less elaborating on it. We're too close to the dispositive outcome.
Meanwhile, assuming the notion herein undertaken proves true, I comfort myself with the sure knowledge that a year from now, as was the case a year after Dick Nixon's departure, all manner of political kerfuffles, furors and outrages will occupy the time of poor writers such as myself — the choice of the self-identifying adjective's double meaning I leave up to you.
I further comfort myself with the uncertain knowledge, as is true for all of us, that I'll still be here to observe it all. Difficult it is to foresee a political landscape airbrushed of the evil that now stalks, but delightful it will be when the horizon is once again clean of the evil's detritus.