Explaining the Inexplicable

"One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions."

-Horace

So, the appellate brief is finally and timely filed, the Augean Stable in this season of consecutive labors. Too much to think about lately; too many major decisions and tasks with no one besides poor P to help navigate it all. With maybe one or two exceptions, the network upon which I've relied to find my way to this point is either dead or MAGA, which for me is basically the same thing. Gone behind a curtain, never to return.

This morning at 5 a.m., during my usual predawn GI travails as my poor gut wrestles with whatever I forced down the gullet the night before, I found myself trying to make sense of the Very Bad Thing that happened four weeks ago today. It seems so long ago now. We were on a ship in the Aegean, bobbing our way from Mikonos to Athens. I let Peg sleep as I scrolled through the election results in horror; she knew my decision not to wake her meant a terrible result as the sun rose and we all realized the American people had engaged in an act of political self-immolation. The Athens radio station in the taxi from the port to the airport, as if on cue, blared "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)" by REM.

No illusions here--it's going to get bad, folks.

Why would someone vote that way? This was the self-discussion topic of the morning. I think part of it is, of course, tribal: our team is the Red Team, the Blue Team is bad, full of pointy-headed people with too many degrees and an agenda we fully understand from watching Fox News whenever we sit down at home or in a doctor's waiting room or the customer lounge of the oil change place. There's no policy, no personal peccadillo that matters either way. It's approaching politics like one approaches college football. Virtue lies on our side because, well, it's our side.

Then there are the misguided or simply not very smart. Don't you care about the price of eggs? Remember how cheap gas was before DJT left office (it wasn't, except for the glut caused by Covid), or how much better the economy was until the election year in 2020 (it wasn't, when compared to the administration that followed)? These are "low information voters", who simply don't know enough or have the bandwidth to see the prevarication and logical fallacies of the arguments they're mouthing, once again arrived fresh daily via Fox News. This crowd scares me a little, because when the price of eggs doesn't drop, or their trip to TJ Maxx for their kids' school clothes costs that much more because of tariffs, they're bound to go looking for someone to blame other than dear leader. That's when folks like me need to have a place in Greece, as they come looking for whom DJT has already labeled enemies of the people.

I think, though, most of these sots fall into two additional categories. The first is comprised of those who don't think he'll do the things he's promised to do, that those threats were just a lot of campaign talk to stir up the rubes. This would be the disappointingly large cohort in my socioeconomic group, who are looking forward to the extension of those tax cuts from which we've all benefited, and maybe the end of taxing social security which, in case everyone missed the memo, also means bankrupting social security just as we're going to need it. Everyone knows he can't fire the entire federal civil service, set up loyalty boards for top military officers, and deport ten percent of those living here, can he? So they're sanguine about the wicked thing that's coming.

The other voting bloc, and these are in some ways the most frightening, are the vandals. They know he's a felon and a rapist, they realize he's promised to weaponize the federal government to pursue anyone whose politics don't align with his, with him. They don't doubt he'll do those things, or hope for some economic goody like a tax cut. They really want to burn the whole thing down, to see the country dragged through a revanchist dumpster fire.

There's a little irony here, that it seems most of these folks are baby boomer types who were screaming "burn baby burn" from the left a half century ago. Now they, or maybe their screwup kids, are chanting the same thing, still directed at what they see as the outward manifestations of authority, which now leans a little left at the top.

The sad and worrisome piece about this last group is that their gleeful vandalism suggests they don't feel any ownership of the institutions and society they're hoping to torch. Both political parties have been a little too good at hollowing out communities like Elmira, where a person could once spend a working life in manufacturing while putting the kids through school and saving a little for retirement, and steadily creating a chasm between haves and have-nots. Neither side gives a shit about these people who don't care about facts or character or anything else it seems. They just want to shake the Etch-a-Sketch and hope the picture turns out better for them in whatever emerges from the chaos.

Viewed that way, this wasn't so much a bad election result as a revolution, or at least the start of one. Most begin this way, with a lurch in a democratic process that sends the national oxcart down the ravine as the newly elected tear away the guardrails that would otherwise keep the plunge from happening.

Then again, what do I know? Peg's correctly observed that I'm really poor at understanding people and why they do what they do. Too much Mr. Spock, I guess. And if there's some sort of quantum bell curve of possible outcomes over the next four years, dismantling our society and building new structures from the bones of the libtards who didn't take heed and escape probably isn't in the "very likely" column, at least not soon.

Time to lean into a little tax homework, then take advantage of a gloriously vacant work schedule to get some thinking stuff done.

Twenty five and mostly cloudy out there. Snow's coming tomorrow, we're told. I probably ought to visit the shed today and make sure we know where to find the salt and the snow shovel.

Dean's not worried, curled next to the dining room radiator where he sleeps twenty hours a day. A life lesson there.