Ink Tea Stone Leaf

It goes without saying that I am endorsing Kamala Harris and, once again, declaring Donald Trump unfit not only for the presidency but for decent human society. If that puts you off from reading this, it’s unfortunate, but I can live with that, as I have a longstanding policy of refusing to pretend that supporting Trump is a respectable position. I hope you come around some day, and have a good long laugh at how flipping bonkers you’ve all been acting.

The fact is, I’ve been living with a terrible anxiety over my head since late last year. Back then it became the conventional wisdom that Trump was going to march virtually unopposed to victory this November, as the country that voted out his authoritarian policies once was now prepared to roll over and welcome him back. Having absorbed all of his fraud and his attempts to illegally remain in power and his promises to ignore whatever parts of the constitution he personally found inconvenient, in addition to his longstanding racism and misogyny, an actual majority of voters seemed to be deciding that all of that mattered much less than the imaginary benefit to their pocketbooks that they hallucinated his policies would bring.

Incidentally, do you ever notice that people only use the word “pocketbook” when they are contriving a justification for voting for a candidate who wants to take away somebody else’s fundamental rights? I’ve noticed that. They’re called wallets.

Since the economy is actually in much better shape than it has been in various crisis elections that saw a party lose control of the White House, I had concluded that the majority of Americans who opposed Trump’s fascistic tendencies in 2016 and 2020 had simply decided that they could stop worrying and learn to love a country perpetually governed by people who would, in a heartbeat, make the purchase of condoms punishable by public whipping, if only they could hamstring all the secular institutions that make that difficult. If the howling minority wanted their golden man in power so badly they nominated him three cycles in a row, surely we could indulge them in a bit of light dictatorship, right?

So yeah, I felt badly about that, just as I felt badly for Joe Biden, who did the country an incredible service by throwing Trump out four years ago, and did the whole world (which, incidentally, includes this country) an invaluable service by taking the single biggest step to addressing climate change that any U.S. president had taken thus far, yet made clear, bit by bit and then all at once, that he wasn’t up for another four years. When my state held its primary election, I wrote in the name of Elizabeth Warren, my preferred candidate from 2016, but I never had any intention of voting for any one in November except the Democratic nominee. Given the choice between two inflexible old men with cognitive decline and delusions of indispensability, I’d choose the one who respected the rule of law and gave a damn about human rights and the health of the planet every time, but it was clear that a majority of the electorate didn’t seem ready to follow my reasoning.

And then, it turned out that one of those old men was not quite so inflexible, that in the most extreme circumstances he could in fact be prevailed upon to see reason and hand the baton to the person who was likely to succeed him at some point in the next four years anyway. Kamala Harris strode onto the stage and I held my breath, wondering if it would make the least bit of difference.

So far, I’d say it has made a world of difference. This election is still much closer than a nation that truly valued its own freedom to its very core would allow it to be, but Harris has already changed the situation from hopeless, to having a fighting chance, to having become a slight favorite to win. She has demonstrated that there is in fact an appetite to see Trump defeated once again, and in particular an appetite to see him defeated by a woman of color (demographically speaking, Trump’s least favorite kind of person, to say nothing of his terror of prosecutors) who will continue to deliver on the policy successes of the Biden administration, who believes in her own ability to do it, who looks like she’s going to have a grand time doing it, and who has decades to go before we’ll likely need to start worrying about the decline of her mental and physical capacities.

And the other guy, the one whose devoted followers regard him as an instrument of divinity, who will save them from the dire threat that their kids will change their names, wear clothes they don’t like, and grow up to have sex they don’t approve of; who will flatter their fantasies of an unimpeachable, righteous history and a Christ-fearing millenarianist future; who will bring back the days when men were men and women were the property of their fathers and husbands in turn; who will insure that no crime goes unpunished if it is committed by somebody who can’t pass a paper bag test? That guy? He seems so confused and unhappy, doesn’t he? He looks like he can’t tell Willy Brown from Nate Holden, and he looks very grumpy when people tell him that maybe his memory is not so fresh anymore.

The lady I’m supporting looks enthusiastic about making this country a better place; she looks like she cares about doing the painstaking hard work to continue moving the United States toward justice, prosperity, health, and freedom. The “gentleman” the Republicans have nominated looks afraid he’ll spend the rest of his years in prison if he can’t manage to get himself installed as president for life, which I must admit is quite a fix to be in. I’m sure there’s a lot of sexual predators, insurrectionists, and fraudsters who wish they had half as good a chance of evading responsibility for their grifts by being elected to high office as he has, but from where I’m standing, his odds appear to be diminishing.

Vote Harris 2024, donate to her campaign, and thank goodness somebody has stepped forward to offer hope and decency when we really need it.