The Life in My Years

Even with 15mg of Melatonin in my system sleep didn’t come easy this morning (bedtime was 12:30 A.M.) and didn’t last long. At 3:30 I was awake and peeking at my phone to see if there was any news but whatever I saw didn’t register.

The rest of the early morning was spent looking up into the darkened ceiling, trying to sort out what had transpired just hours earlier. And what it all means.

When I went to bed, the President of the United States had just made a brief, fuming appearance in the White House in front of family, supporters and assorted cult members. He blithered for a while about his leads in battleground states being insurmountable before cutting to the chase, that in his estimation the vote in these states was fraudulent because an abundance of votes were yet to be counted. And then to the cheers of his forelock tuggers he announced that he was going to ask the Supreme Court to halt the vote counting. Welcome to coup American style. As of this writing at 9:30 A.M. I’ve heard nothing more about the Supreme Court. Maybe one of his handlers bitch slapped him or force fed him his meds.

When I got up and turned on the T.V I saw that Biden had taken the lead in Wisconsin and Michigan, was still ahead in Nevada and surprisingly Arizona. Trump had a significant lead in Pennsylvania but Biden was, and still is, as of this writing, closing the gap with over a million ballots still to be counted.

10:00 A.M. Mark Kelly has defeated Martha McSally, flipping a Senate seat to the Democrats but right now that’s small comfort. The once touted “blue tsunami” has turned into more of a yellow trickle down the pants leg. Mitch McConnell shellacked Amy McGrath; Lindsay Graham waxed Jaime Harrison; Susan Collins who was supposed to be vulnerable will return to the Senate and Ben Sasse who had incurred Trumpian wrath will also retain his seat. It’s still within the realm of possibility that the Senate will be flipped but prospects are dimming.
10:10 A.M. With only a few hundred votes left to count, Biden has a 20,500 vote lead in Wisconsin and looks to take the Badger State. Trump’s campaign has already announced that they’ll ask for a recount in that state.
With a significant amount of urban votes to be counted Georgia is still in play.

Either way this goes it will be razor thin and even if Biden wins, the final results, indeed the results as they stand now, reveal an ugly American story. Biden’s campaign cry was that this election is a battle for “the soul of America.” If that’s true then this election has exposed America’s soul to be a truly dark, depraved place.

In a just, upright and moral society the scenario that would play out would be one in which Donald Trump would be soundly defeated. However this ends, the final count will show that a very large segment of America has backed a divisive, lying racist who has disregarded decorum, trampled on the Constitution and comported himself alternately like a dictator or a king.  America approves of the whole package of outrages. America is okay with being duped about a pandemic and the disparaging of the medical community.  America is fine with the further destruction of the environment and America doesn’t buy the science of global warming. America has decided that it’s traditional allies are expendable and Vladimir Putin is not an existential threat. This election is showing that the American soul, if there is one, is not worth battling for.

“Not my president” has for the past four years been the slogan of the anti-Trump movement. The Trump cult dismisses this as sour grapes but the truth is that for those who live in blue states, for those who oppose him, for people of color, for the LGBTQ community, for immigrants and for those who seek justice, Trump has CHOSEN to not be their president. He embraces and is embraced by white supremacists, while threatening the opposition and the press and mocking the marginalized. This is Trumpism. And it’s evil.

As of this writing Trump has received 48.2 percent of the national popular vote. Nearly half of the voting American public embraces or at the very least accepts Trumpism. Given this, how can one suggest that Trumpism is un-American? Indeed it seems that Trumpism is very much American. This is a hard pill to swallow.

During the past four years I’ve told myself that Donald Trump was just a fluke, a political anomaly that would be corrected with the 2020 election. I’m starting to think that the fluke was Barack Obama.

As of publication, Biden is the projected winner of Wisconsin.