1.
A smoke pall in the stratosphere blurs the sky. Light is unfocused, passing through a prism of ash and soot carried overhead by the jet stream. The smoke originates in fires in the West, the land of promise that is now the place of burning. It’s mid-October, a season within a season that was once called Indian Summer, warm serene days following on cool nights and mornings. Against the cream-colored sky, the trees glow like stained glass panes, lit from within by the vivid impulse of the green, growing tree: it’s the outer sphere of leaves that now blaze gold or scarlet, clasped around an inner core of foliage not yet changed by the season. The weather is very mild, the calm before a great storm.
2.
It can’t be denied that the air, beneath its sweet and senescent fragrance of ripening fruit, is a little toxic: pollen is abroad, wafting from dying flowers, and I’m congested and feel faintly feverish – symptoms that are alarming in view of the Coronavirus. The blossoms are winking out like supernovas in the farthest reaches of space: last color emitting bursts of pollen that I imagine to be jagged like tiny barbed fishhooks. And this is the time when farmers spread hog manure from slurry trucks in their fields. Thus, there is a pervasive, if slight, stench of excrement coloring everything, a darkness that is abroad even where it is most bright. There’s bad breath in the great mouth of the sky.
3.
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness...and, still more later flowers for the bees/ Until they think warm days will never cease...” Keats populates his Autumn, naming, as well, among other creatures, two more insects: the singing “hedge-crickets” and, “then, in a wailful choir, the small gnats (that) mourn/ Among the river sallows, borne aloft/ Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies...” Here “sallows” means small willows, water-loving trees lining the river over which the midges are blown “aloft” or “sink” according to the vagaries of the “light wind”, the so-called “Sally gardens’ of old folk tunes. (“Sallow”also names a jaundiced, yellow hue – a faint deathly trace incidentally coloring this landscape that is, in fact, ripening into its own demise.)
Keats’ powers of observation, of course, are extraordinary. Indian Summer, at least in southeastern Minnesota, is indeed the season “small gnats”, genus ceratopogonidae, “biting midges” or, as they are sometimes called, “no-see-ums.” Yesterday evening, as I sat on my porch reading, I felt various sharp and prickling pains preying upon my attention. Scarcely visible, tiny black flies, winged creatures the size of the pointed tip of a mechanical pencil lead, were landing on my forearms, throat, and wrists and, apparently, biting me with surgically designed pharynx-parts too small to discern except with a microscope. These midges are ubiquitous at this time of year, drawn by the carbon dioxide in human and animal breath – the males are harmless inseminators, flecks of black pollen themselves, but the females cannot produce eggs without first inhaling a drop of protein in the form of blood - thus, the bites which seem all out of proportion to the delicately microscopic insects. These creatures are as ephemeral as this final autumnal radiance – from larva to death, a biting midge lives only two to four weeks. Due to their tiny size, the midges are poor fliers, the slightest wind buffets them – where there is even a hint of breeze the midges are whisked away.
4.
Insects dominate the last week. During the vice-presidential debate, a housefly appeared out of nowhere and landed in the snowy white fleece on Mike Pence’s majestic head. Either Pence found the presence of the fly, as a kindred fellow-traveler, congenial, or, simply, didn’t notice the creature festooning his scalp; he didn’t react in any way and made no effort to brush away the little visitor. In this day and age, stopwatches are put to such things – the fly adorned Pence for more than 2 minutes and, I think, six seconds, a bizarre and inexplicable phenomenon. Of course, the fly became the protagonist of a thousand merry memes – everything from “flies on shit or garbage” to elaborate satirical essays name-checking Beezelbub as the “lord of flies” and, of course, deceit. As suddenly as it had appeared, the fly dematerialized without Pence ever reacting in any way whatsoever.
The fly will be the only thing memorable about the debate between Kamala Harris and Vice-president Pence. Both antagonists stuck to their scripts and talking points. Neither answered the questions posed to them, rather choosing to riff on themes that they thought would score points for their cause, thereby frustrating viewers with wholly non sequitur answers. Harris refused to say how she would urge California legislators to react if Roe v. Wade were reversed. Similarly, she refused to eschew the crazy notion of packing the Supreme Court in retaliation for the Republican’s accelerated nomination process (and hypocrisy) with respect to appointing Amy Coney Barrett to the High Court – this sort of reprisal (court-packing) merely leads to further cycles of vengeance that will end with the Supreme Court in the year 2035 possessing about forty justices and acting as a mini-Senate. Harris also ignored a pertinent question about what transition plans have been made for her to succeed to power if her 77 year old running mate (he will be 78 when inaugurated) were to be unable to serve. Of course, Pence likewise refused to comment on succession issues with respect to the 74-year old Trump who seems increasingly deranged with each passing hour and, now, may be clinically psychotic as a result of side-effects of drugs prescribed to treat his Covid infection. Pence ducked questions about the virus in general, notwithstanding the fact that it is now ravaging the White House. He also refused to say what he would urge the people of Indiana to do if Roe v. Wade were no longer the law of the land and each State cast into the inferno of controversy surrounding abortion-on-demand. Of course, like his boss, he wouldn’t agree to concede the election in the event of defeat, continuing to urge that the voting process is rigged. Pence probably ignored or avoided more direct questions than Harris, although neither was particularly forthcoming with respect to anything substantive, preferring instead to lob accusations and counter-accusations against one another. Media commentators on the liberal side all deplored Pence’s “man-splaining” and his willingness to ignore the rules and keep on talking when it was Ms. Harris turn to speak. But this accusation, broadly announced on CNN and MSNBC, turned out to be illusory – again, a stop-watch was put to the task of measuring the amount of time each candidate was afforded: as it turned-out, the measures were equal within any reasonable margin of error – Harris, in fact, may have enjoyed one second more air-time than Pence.
In many ways, the VP-debate was more painful and more disheartening than the “barbaric yawp” of the Presidential debate ten days or so earlier. Both Pence and Harris seem reasonably intelligent and they speak in complete grammatical sentences and remain within the realm of propriety in their accusations and denunciations. But nightmarish lying phrased in a civil way remains nightmarish lying and neither of them got any of the relevant facts right and, indeed, misrepresented just about everything. Kamala Harris is buxom and attractive and she has a beautiful smile – she spent most of the debate grinning in disbelief at Pence’s ignorance and deceit. But her grin debased itself into smirking from time to time and the stuff coming out of her mouth was all untrue. Pence seems to be some kind of mannequin, devoid of any ordinary human feelings or, even, sensorium – as noted above, he didn’t seem capable of perceiving that a fly was dancing around in his immaculately groomed silver hair. One of his eyes seemed a bit bloody and his features were weirdly expressionless and, of course, the garbage spewing from his mouth was equally noxious. The reason that this debate was even more depressing than the howls at the earlier screaming match was that this filth was all neatly packaged, grammatically expressed, and, even, respectfully presented – but, in substance, it was the same web of lies belched out during the previous presidential debate.
5.
In the middle of the debate, Joe Biden’s campaign flashed a tweet of the Presidential candidate brandishing a fly-swatter. You could donate 5 dollars to the campaign and get a souvenir fly swatter. Biden is said to have raised something like $125,000 before the debate had concluded.
6.
Virus is information technology. A viral signal is amplified, then, transmitted as an infection. Each person infected is an amplifier for the biological signal represented by the virus.
This idea correlates to the way noxious information spreads virally in our communication networks. As an example, President Trump tweets that Kamala Harris is a “monster.” From a journalism perspective, this isn’t even factual information – it’s just name-calling and, probably, not worthy of being reported. But the fact that the President of the United States is calling names presumably is deemed as newsworthy not because Harris is (or is not) a “monster” whatever this means, but because the President said such a thing. So each of the Cable News Networks reports that Trump called Harris “a monster”. Pundit testimony is, then, offered into evidence: an expert of some kind says that Trump was irresponsible to call Harris a “monster” because of the effect this may have on the various militia-men and other crazies armed and dangerous and roaming the nation. An opposing point-of-view is introduced, namely that it is legitimate First Amendment-protected political discourse to call Harris a “monster.” A panel of experts, then, appears in split-screen to discuss the issue. A Black woman says that calling Harris a “monster” is evidence of White racism. A surrogate for the Trump campaign says that it’s not racist to call Harris a “monster” – “monster” is a universal term of derogation and has nothing to do with the color of one’s skin. A presidential historian adds to the fray: to his knowledge, no president has previously characterized a political opponent as a “monster.” Then, a Republican senator says that the terminology is unfortunate: Ms. Harris although not a “monster,” has done “monstrous things.” And so it goes for a news cycle. Before 24 hours have passed, Kamala Harris has been publicly called “a monster” hundreds of times on air. We know that repetition is an important tool for persuasion. By denouncing Trump’s tweet, the claim that the vice-presidential candidate is a “monster” is broadcast to millions who otherwise wouldn’t have been aware of this name-calling. Some percentage of viewers, undoubtedly, will begin to regard Harris as “monstrous.” The media will defend itself by saying that no one literally believes that Harris is a monster – and no minds will be changed because you are either for or against her, “monster” or not. But this is a dodge: call someone a “monster” enough times, some aspect of the accusation will stick to the slippery mucous membranes of the mind. It’s just the way things work.
Early in his term, Trump said that Mika Brzezinski, the liberal-leaning host, with Joe Scarborough, of MSNBC’s Morning Joe couldn’t attend a gathering at Mar a Lago because she was recovering from facial plastic surgery and bleeding all over everything. Trump made this statement in retaliation for some criticism that Mika Brzezinski had leveled at him on-air. I no longer recall what the TV host said to trigger this statement, but I can’t shake the image of this very attractive woman with her face smeared with blood. (Mika Brzezinski, more or less, admitted the incident saying that she had “had some work done” on her jaw-line and “was very pleased with it.”) Now the fact that a beautiful and accomplished TV personality submits herself to cosmetic surgery has no bearing on anything significant – it shouldn’t cause you to have any particular perspective on Mika Brzezinski’s probity or credibility. But Trump is a master of this sort of thing – his “put-down”, directed at the TV host with casual brutality, affects the way that you see this woman. You can’t exactly shake the image. It burrows into your subconscious in the same way that the assertion that Kamala Harris is a “monster” also invades your imagination – maybe not on first utterance but when the statement has been repeated two- or three-hundred times.
The media hasn’t figured out how to cover Donald Trump. This is obvious. Perhaps, there is no way to cover this President without amplifying to a grotesque extent the most objectionable things that he says. And, of course, it’s precisely these things that should not be amplified.
One aspect of this problem is the media’s habit of confusing their good intentions with the actual effect of their reporting. No one in the media who reported that Trump called Kamala Harris a “monster” has any actual adverse intent with respect to the candidate. To the contrary, the media intends to instigate outrage with respect to the statement. But this intention is swamped by the mere fact that the “monster” epithet is repeated hundreds, if not, thousands of times.
On the National Public Radio show, This American Life, a journalist reports on a grotesque episode in the history of the Canadian media. A wealthy eccentric, a Toronto lawyer, died childless. In his Will, he proposed to distribute a sum equivalent to 10 million dollars to the woman who carried the most children to term in a ten year period. This bizarre bequest was widely reported and engendered something called “the Stork Derby”. Of course, the media took interest in this competition and reported on it incessantly during the ten year period during which the bequest was in effect.
Predictably, the results of the “Stork Derby” were horrific. The bizarre offer was made during the height of the Depression when many Canadians were out-of-work and starving. The three front-runners were an Italian woman married to an Irish immigrant – she ended up producing 12 living children after 18 or 19 pregnancies, a woman of ill repute who hired a man to impregnate her (the man also beat her up regularly) and a dirt-poor French-Canadian who spoke no English. The competition encouraged precisely those women who could least afford another mouth to feed to produce more children. (One of the babies was literally eaten by rats.) Ultimately, the three front-runners were disqualified on specious grounds – the WASP community in Toronto didn’t want to see the money going to unworthy non-English-speaking slum-dwellers. There was extensive litigation as to whether the children born to Stork Derby contestants had to be “legitimate offspring” (not specified in the Will) and whether “still-births” counted – and, if so, did the child have to draw breath before expiring. The whole thing was hideous and, as one might expect, the legacy was ultimately distributed to three suburban mothers, married and with impeccable Scotch-Irish genes.
The young woman reporting on this story is appalled by the racist character of the news coverage when the competition occurred. She cites awful slurs in Toronto newspapers and on the radio. In general, the gist of her reporting is that the competition was profoundly immoral, its outcome rigged, and the journalism associated with Stork Derby was condescending and ghastly. The female reporter has a nice radio voice that oozes elite education – undoubtedly, this young woman went to an Ivy League school and she imagines herself politically liberal, “woke”, and progressive. Thus, her stance is that all right-thinking people should denounce the Stork Competition, the eugenics that marred reporting on the contest, and the misogyny and racism associated with this disheartening episode. But, of course, reporting on the Stork Derby, amplifies a footnote in media history into a prominent story broadcast all over the country on a prestigious radio show. (I had never heard of the “Stork Derby.”) This terrible episode has no redeeming social interest – the tale is presented for our edification, but is profoundly prurient, even voyeuristic in an unpleasant way. And the story is also fascinating. Movies have been made about the Stork Derby and, I expect, more movies are on the way.
Even as she is denouncing the media’s unseemly fascination with the Stork Derby, the reporter strives to make the story interesting to her listeners. She is amplifying, accordingly, a viral story that has been long dead, transmitting it to world, and guilty, of course, of the very thing that she denounces. Her intentions are good and, therefore, the journalist seems to think that these good intentions immunize her from the bad consequences of her reporting.
7.
Saturday Night Live is still, as they say, “a thing.” When I was in law school, I watched the show from the lobby of the little motel where I worked as a Desk Clerk. That is now 45 years ago. I tuned in on the show on October 11, 2020, primarily for the political satire – it was edgy stuff and more than a little mean-spirited. Keenan Thompson, who has been on the program for many years, dressed up as a fly and pretended to cavort on Mike Pence’s scalp. Jim Carrey played another fly in a parody of the Cronenberg horror film – somehow Biden (mimicked unconvincingly by Carrey) was teleported in the body of a fly onto Pence’s head. Herman Cain, the African-American presidential candidate (and former CEO of Godfather’s pizza) appeared as well, impersonated by Keenan Thompson, rubbing his hands and muttering imprecations with a buzzing lisp. Herman Cain died from Covid after attending one of Donald Trump’s misguided political rallies and so there was a harsh edge to the comedy – it was more cutting than funny. Paying homage to a notorious scene in The Fly, Carrey vomited white goo all over Pence’s hair follicles.
SNL had booked a country western singer Morgan Wallen as its musical guest. Wallen foolishly posted a video of himself partying in an Alabama bar, apparently after a college football game – “we were celebrating the Crimson Tide,” he said by way of explanation. Saturday Night Live is concerned about spreading Covid through its TV show since the program, as the name reflects, is recorded live before a studio audience. Therefore, Wallen had breached the show’s Covid protection protocols by potentially exposing himself to the disease and was told that he couldn’t perform. By this point, Wallen was already in New York. From his hotel room, he promptly posted a video on the internet apologizing for his irresponsibility. SNL, then, contacted Jack White and asked him appear on short notice – it was two days before the live taping of the program on the 11th of October.
White’s performance turned out to be the highlight of the show. He played a medley of three songs, a tune by Beyonce that segued into an apocalyptic version of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Jesus is coming now”, an old Blues song about the Spanish flu. White ended the medley with a thunderous account of his own blues song “Ball and a Biscuit.” The lyrics were hard to hear behind White’s screeching guitar and amidst the roar of drums, somehow played like tom-toms by the drummer standing upright, but I caught enough of the words to feel a tingle run up my spine: “The great disease was mighty and people were sick everywhere / It was an epidemic and it traveled through the air.” Then: “Well, the nobles said to the people: You better close your schools / Until the events of death has ending, you better close your churches too.” And: “We done told you / Oh, God’s done warned you / Jesus is coming soon.” I had no idea, as I watched the show, that the words were more than ninety years old and about the Spanish flu. White seemed to be somehow channeling the aghast mood of the present moment. But the effect was electrifying. I looked up the performance on the web the next day and saw that many others had experienced the song as I did – a shock to the system heralding the last days.
8.
The morning after watching SNL, I drove out a little after dawn amidst howling wind. The skies were lit fitfully by columns of white light. Broken clouds in swift armadas flung themselves across the sky. Over a desolate intersection where the wind was burning like a torch, I saw the figure of huge man, his shoulders sprouting dark wings, arms and legs outstretched as he seemed to fall out of the sky. But it was a cloud, cut into the profile of falling angel by the gale: instead of plummeting to the earth, the cloud flew sideways above the horizon.
9.
Two town halls: Trump and Joe Biden. Biden is in a circular pit, a sort of hell with rings of seats arranged vertically around him. He has to gaze up to the zenith to speak to his masked interlocutors who hover high over this pit. Trump sits on a stool at his town-hall, one leg outstretched. He rages at the moderator. In the shot showing Trump, three figures, out of focus, appear over his shoulder. All of them are women, masked and anonymous – one of the women seems to nod encouragement at everything that Trump says, but the bobbing of her head is so continuous that ultimately one must conclude that she is the victim of some sort of malady, Parkinson’s perhaps, or an essential tremor. The woman wears a white sweater and, blurred, behind Trump, she seems to have the figure of an odalisque. There is a horror movie aspect about both Town Halls – if these images had been shown to us a year ago, we would have recoiled in terror and disgust at the masked figures, the uncanny voids between people, the mostly empty galleries and auditoriums.
10.
Vegas is laying odds 9 to 1 that Biden wins the election. I have business at town hall and, from the conference room, I can see a steady stream of voters climbing the steps to the upstairs rooms where early voting is underway.
11.
In the final debate between Biden and Trump, the format, promoted as hostile to the incumbent president, turns out to favor him. Because of the catastrophic first debate in which Trump simply bulldozed Biden, interrupting him and speaking over his opponent’s words, the Debate Commission supplied a mute button, cutting sound to the adversary’s microphone during the two minute period allocated to the candidate for uninterrupted speech. Trump’s campaign decried this measure as unfair to the President and, in advance of the debate, the President denounced the moderator, Kristine Welker, as prejudiced against him. But, in fact, this debate protocol turned out to be beneficial to Trump. The President was able to lie succinctly and effectively for two minutes, then, pause to allow Biden to haltingly frame a response, and, then, offer, yet another compact lie to undercut what his adversary said. Trump has long since lost the faculty of knowing himself when he lies – when his lips are moving he’s lying. As a result, he dissembles with great ease, never showing any of the signs of discomfort that an honorable person might evince upon telling a lie. Trump lies aggressively, confidently, and with utter assurance. And, since, his lies were reduced to two-minute blasts of disinformation, the President didn’t get trapped in the convolutions of his own deceit. Generally, a person who is lying will find themselves facing some aspect of the truth that can’t be denied if they persist in the lie – this never happened to Trump during the ninety-minute debate.
By contrast, Joe Biden was tentative, often incoherent, and, sometimes, seemed confused. The pain one endures in watching him speak is that you know what he is trying to say, but must recognize that he rarely knows how to say it. The gap between the intent of his words and what he actually says can be agonizing. Biden’s efforts at irony were complete and miscalculated flops. At one point, he called Trump “Abraham Lincoln”, presumably in a effort to dramatize who Trump is not – the subject matter was racism. Trump, who also has trouble deciphering more sophisticated forms of rhetoric, expressed dismay that the doddering old fool had forgotten who he was – Trump’s knowledge of history is so inexact that he probably was wondering whether Biden actually knew “Honest” Abe. (Everything before about 1960 is a blur to Trump.) Whether Trump understood the irony or not, the moment was surreal – there was, indeed, a sense that Biden appeared to have forgotten for an instant who he was debating. Something similar occurred with a carefully contrived moment of sarcasm: Biden turned to the camera and said: “So you’re a teacher. Okay, you can just go ahead and die.” The candidate said this with real vehemence. Of course, Biden was apparently mimicking Trump’s callousness about school teachers and the virus, but the effect was the opposite – he seemed to be urging teachers to do their jobs, shut up, and die from the disease. In general, irony is unsuccessful in this sort of forum and should be avoided.
As the debate wore on, Biden seemed increasingly disoriented. He was caught checking his watch at one point – obviously wishing that the ordeal was over. Trump takes sustenance from lying; lies are the oxygen that he breathes and, so, as the ninety-minute debate continued, he actually seemed to draw energy from the succession of whoppers that he was telling. Biden tried for empathy and attempted a vivid picture of a family deprived of loved ones by the Covid virus. He said that there would be an empty chair at the dinner table – invoking a trope that goes back to the Civil War, at least, in this country. Then, he described a man or woman in bed, reaching for — . Here, Biden blinked and couldn’t quite figure out where he was going. Obviously, the old man was tripped up by the notion that someone is in bed reaching for his wife’s ass or thigh – it was pretty clear that this was where he was instinctively heading with the image. Then, he paused and said something like: “....reaching...reaching for a ... someone who is customarily supposed to be there...but not there.” These fumbled words were the most confusing possible way to express his meaning. Late in the debate, he told the world that he was going to abolish the oil industry in this country. The remark was unclear and it wasn’t exactly what he intended to say, and, in most respects, Biden is a wily ancient pol, adept at evading questions or providing meaningless pablum answers. But he was tired and, so, apparently said something approximately accurate to his actual platform and will pay the price for this remark in the next couple days. At one point, Biden called the White Supremacist group, the “Proud Boys”, the “Po’ Boys” – possibly the candidate was hungry but he confused the hate group with a sandwich.
About 12 minutes of the debate was consumed with arcane references to a laptop computer that has suddenly surfaced. The computer claimed to contain incriminating if, apparently, enigmatic emails involving Hunter Biden seems (at this writing) to be a prop manufactured by Russian intelligence to spread disinformation in the election. The mainstream media won’t cover the story because it is poorly documented, and, if the truth be told, hostile to Joe Biden, a candidate that the liberal news outlets treat with kid gloves. Since only Fox News junkies know the details of this story, the exchanges about Hunter Biden devolved into esoteric accusations that Biden, himself, didn’t seem to understand. Trump made no progress with this line of attack.
There were other oddities. An extensive argument on fracking, aimed at voters in Pennsylvania, demonstrated dramatically the flaws in America’s electoral college system for presidential elections. Fracking is a subject that probably affects about 15,000 to 20,000 people, mostly in rural areas of Pennsylvania – it is an issue of no real consequence. Yet since both candidates are desperate to win Pennsylvania’s electoral votes, and since the margin in that State is (probably) razor-thin, those votes matter intensely and so constituents in the corn and soybean-belt of the Midwest or those living in big cities with decaying infrastructure and industries were subjected to an intense debate on a subject that has almost no importance anywhere but in the Keystone State. Clashes about immigration policy similarly went grotesquely awry. ICE, the immigration cops, separated children from families crossing illegally at the border and, now, seem to have lost the contact information for the deported parents of about 500 minors. This is an awful humanitarian scandal, but, ultimately, of no significance to the electorate – indeed, Trump is doing fairly well, according to recent polls, with Hispanic voters, people that have some cultural affiliation with “strong man” politics. Biden seemed ready to shed hot tears for these poor children. Trump’s riposte was bizarre – he blamed Biden and his boss, Obama, for building the cages in which these children had been temporarily confined, remarking that “we are treating them very well.” The fact is that the Obama-Biden regime was possibly more inhumane than Trump’s ham-handed efforts to intimidate migrants at the border. Obama was called “the Deporter-in-Chief”. But Obama managed his misdeeds with silky suavity – and, with the exception of largely fringe group news, most of the media was too intimidated by Obama to call him to account for his cruel immigration policies. But Trump, who is literal-minded in the extreme, apparently thought the issue could be reduced to a simple question of who built the holding cages (apparently the Obama administration) and hammered away on this irrelevant point. Once again, the debate veered into the surreal with an issue of minuscule importance to the electorate over all improbably cast in a lurid, apocalyptic light.
After the debate, the liberal media tried to “gaslight” the audience into ignoring the evidence of their own eyes. Most media savants declared that the debate had no clear winner. But this was untrue: Trump’s performance was clearly superior to Biden’s mumbling and doddering. Trump, of course, has the advantage of being capable of lying with enormous facility and conviction on every possible subject – an analyst would be well-advised to pick out of this mess of deceit the few true statements that the president made, pearls among garbage otherwise purveyed; identifying Trump’s lies, which were the rule not the exception, will be a thankless task: it would be far easier to identify the times, few and far between, when he accidentally spoke the truth. In the last debate, the debacle in which the candidates just shrieked insults at one another, the Press had no hesitation in declaring Biden the victor. But here the media reverts to its standard analysis: the debate was a draw, at least, Biden didn’t lose, and no one will be persuaded by this spectacle anyway. (When the media declared Biden the clear winner in the earlier debate, the Press was convinced that this would affect the outcome of the election – it’s hard to determine to what extent the Press intentionally deceives about what we can clearly see with our own eyes and to what extent they are the victims of their own wishful thinking.) In fact, however, the debate comes eleven days before the election and about half the electorate has already cast their votes. So, in this case, it’s probably reasonable to assume that the debate will be of no consequence.
In some ways, this second debate was more disheartening than the first. In the previous encounter, viewers were exposed to the true dimensions of Trump’s megalomania. In this encounter, the victory went to Trump, not because of his wisdom or rhetorical skills, but because of his savage facility for lying, a skill that comes from simply not knowing, or caring, what the truth might be.
12.
Over the noon hour, Minnesota Public Radio re-broadcast the presidential debate. While driving between errands, I listened to some of the exchanges on my car radio. Without the visuals, Biden sounds firmer and less confused. Trump’s remarks often verge on paranoid delusion. Biden looks physically frail and there is something about his appearance that weakens his words. Both men speak non-syntactically and shift subject without any preamble and with dizzying rapidity. They both steadfastly refuse to moor their pronouns to any antecedent – “he” could refer to the opponent or a third-party; sometimes, “he” or “him” has two different meanings in a single sentence. The speeches of both candidates are monstrous, signifying serious dysfunction in thought – disordered speech usually means disordered cognition. At one point, Trump makes the bizarre boast that he was selling armaments to the Ukraine when Joe Biden was peddling “sheets and pillows”. This is wholly baffling – particularly since one of Trump’s most ardent, and vocal, supporters is the con-man Mike Lindahl, the pillow manufacturer from Minnesota.
It turns out that the “pillows and sheets” allusion, seemingly opaque to Vice-President Biden, has puzzled others as well. In fact, it isn’t at all clear what Trump meant. Some suggest that the comment relates back to a remark made by late Arizona senator, John McCain. President Obama was reluctant to commit to sending lethal armaments to the Ukrainians involved in war with Russia. McCain, who advocated sending lethal weaponry to the Ukrainians said that it wasn’t helping this ally much to send them “meals and blankets” (that is, non-lethal assistance) when they needed tanks and missiles. Some journalists speculate that Trump was hearkening back to McCain’s criticism of the Obama administration – but this seems a “stretch” to me and would require a greater understanding of, and memory for, nuances of American foreign policy to which Trump seems indifferent. In my view, Trump somehow got it into his mind that Biden’s son, Hunter, was actually selling bedding to the Ukrainians and simply repeated that allegation, wholly unfounded as it was, during the debate.
13.
The noose, it seems, is drawing tighter. In the week before the election, everyone knows several people who are isolating due to Covid-19 exposure. A bonfire scheduled for a cold and windy night, responsibly social distanced and with masked attendees, has to be canceled because the host, coming from Madison, Wisconsin, has tested positive for the illness together with his wife and two small children. It feels as if the social fabric is unraveling, but that’s just a verbal formula for it’s opposite – in fact, the virus is making everything coherent to its meanings; it is consolidating its grip and asserting dominion over the entire world. For a moment, I suppose, it could be argued that the virus demonstrates in its awful way, the unity of mankind. But the centrifugal forces are also strong – the election immerses the country in a wave of factional hatred. People are arrested on suspicion of domestic terrorism – there are plots to blow up government buildings and kidnap governors. A profoundly confused group of White Supremacists, the so-called Boogaloo Bois, are apprehended for plotting to join Hezbollah or Hamas, Islamic extremist groups, in attacks on police. In fact, one of these extremists, apparently forgetting his allegiance to White Supremacy, joins the mob during the protests arising from the death of George Floyd and sprays the 3rd Precinct police headquarters with automatic rifle fire. Of course, the Feds have infiltrated these groups and, probably, are inspiring their most outre schemes. One group of Boogaloo Bois has even named itself after the Mujaheddin, a Middle East terrorist enterprise – these aspiring dynamiters and murderers have called themself the “Boojaheddin.” This would be funny but...but what? It is funny – silly, in fact. The airwaves are swamped with political advertisements that accuse adversaries not merely of bad governance and poor policy, but outright murder: Democrats contend that Trump and his minions are slaughtering the American people by their reckless approach to the Covid-19 catastrophe; Republicans allege that governmental shutdowns are leading to mass suicide and that the officials in the party of the loyal opposition have allowed major American cities to be burned to the ground by terrorist gangsters, groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Everyone hates everyone else. The smug TV commentators prone to accuse United States politicians of negligence with respect to Covid as compared with their European counterparts (who are alleged to have controlled the spread of the virus in their countries) should be humbled: infections in Europe are now skyrocketing and most nations there are under variants of curfew with restaurants and bars closed. But no one will admit error. No one is humbled. Everyone simply persists in their assertions that they are right and that everyone else is not only wrong, but has been proven wrong time and time again – although nothing at all has been proven.
It’s as if the human race, confronted with a monstrous invasion from Outer Space, were to ignore the aliens and turn toward slaughtering one another.
14.
The Trump campaign seems to embody some sort of death wish. Trump flies into States where the covid-19 virus is raging, presides over an unmasked mass rally with fans packed cheek to jowl, and, then, jets away. While at the podium, he spews a harangue that is both figuratively venomous and literally toxic. People go home and get sick. His campaign is about spreading contagion. Trump supporters think that this contagion is an infectious swell of support – the mainstream media portray these events as Covid “super-spreaders.”
At a rally in Omaha, Trump’s campaign does its level-best to materialize in allegorical form all of the accusations leveled at him. Thousands of people crowd together in an unheated airport hangar. There’s no parking on-site and so Trump’s supporters have left their vehicles several miles away and been shuttle-bused to the rally. After his speech, Trump boards the plane and flies to his next campaign stop. For some reasons, the shuttle-buses don’t return to the hangar to ferry his supporters back to their vehicles. (The official explanation is that the site was accessed by a single narrow road, apparently unlit, and, after the rally, the Trump fans, uncertain as to what they should do, marched back down the access road, blocking it so completely that the shuttle-buses couldn’t reach the crowd at the hangar – this explanation seems questionable to me.) The result is that thousands of people find themselves stranded in the middle of nowhere with no way to reach their vehicles. Snow covers the ground and the ditches are wet and its dark and about 22 degrees Fahrenheit. The mob staggers around in the fields, people fall over, some suffer frostbite and hypothermia – apparently, seven of Trump’ supporters have to be evacuated by ambulance.
Trump has always been perceived as a agent of chaos. Chaos is his modus operandi. He applies this method to his campaign as well as to governance, foreign policy, and management of the covid crisis. His message to his followers is that they are merely props in the spectacle that he is staging for Tv cameras. Vote for me, he seems to say, and, then, die.
If Trump were to announce that his new policy is to harvest his most fervent followers for their protein content and, after slaughter, serve them as breakfast sausage, these people would persist in voting for him.
15.
The mornings are lightless, dark to an extent that also seems eerily symbolic. One day, it’s raining. Dawn is deferred and, then, never happens at all. At 9:00 am, the sky is black and the trees dripping wet and icy water churns in the gutters, a strange sort of fluid that doesn’t reflect headlights but, instead, seems to suck the beams into the murk. On the internet, there are all sorts of panicked inquiries. “What’s with the sky this morning?” – “Why is it dark as midnight mid-morning?” Some people comment that it may have something to do with the massive clouds of smoke from Western fires high in the stratosphere. Or this darkness may originate in a hurricane that is lashing the Gulf Coast. It’s interesting how quickly one becomes acclimated to this ancient-seeming and perpetual darkness. The sun swiftly becomes unimaginable. The gloom is endless and impenetrable. This is the world for which we were made.
Driving to a mediation in Mankato, I scan the dark eastern horizon for any sign of dawn. But it’s grimly dark in that direction, thick, swollen clouds soldered to the grey shadowy horizon. A sliver of light hangs in the sky to the northwest. This faint illumination looks pink, as if the earth had shifted on its axis so that the sunrise is trying to take hold in this foreign tract in the sky. The freeway shifts direction a little and I can see that the little pink window is, in fact, amber-orange – there’s a city in that direction and its lights paint a glowing swath across that quadrant of the heavens. There’s no evidence of the sun at all.
16.
Everything that I do comes to naught. I can predict these failures before they happen. They are part of the structure of my world.
17.
Four days before the election. Halloween is tomorrow. The Center for Disease Control rates trick-or-treating as a high risk activity. The sort of masks worn by children on the cold, dark streets as they go from house to house won’t protect against covid. If you go out on Halloween, you must wear a mask under your mask. The mask under the mask is now your true face.
18.
On the day before Halloween, I drive to a court appearance in St. Paul. (I am scheduled to move the admission to the Bar of a young friend who is working as a Law Clerk at the Court of Appeals.) In the past, I have found that it is difficult to park around the Capitol Building and, further, not always easy to pass through security protecting the judges and courtrooms at the Appellate Court. And I haven’t driven to the Twin Cities since before the Covid virus came to Minnesota – that is, for about eight months.
The interstate to Minneapolis is busy, everyone driving, at least, fifteen miles per hour faster than the posted speed. The traffic seems to be fleeing some kind of catastrophe just beyond what can be seen in the rear-view mirror. In the suburbs, the roads are bustling but not crowded. I stop in Eagan at an upscale grocery store to buy something to eat. It’s my idea that I will reach the Court of Appeals an hour early, find a suitable parking spot and, then, walk around the Capitol quadrangle until about 20 minutes before the hearing is scheduled. There won’t be anything to eat in that area on the long, treeless slopes up to the capitol dome and, so, I think it’s best to get a bite to eat in the bright, sunlit suburbs.
The grocery store’s parking lot is crowded, lots of expensive SUVs lined up at the trough. In the store, I am walking toward the check-out when a woman pushing a cart beside me says: “It’s so good to see a man wearing business attire.” (I am dressed in a olive-grey suit with a new, freshly starched white dress shirt and a blue-grey silk tie.) She adds: “You don’t see this anymore.” “Well, I have an appointment,” I say. This is not too helpful but it would be complicated to explain my mission for the day. “You look good,” she says.
The grounds of the capitol building are vacant, no one is stirring, and, although the weather is fine, it is unseasonably cold. I drive up the sloping lane beside the great marble dome. The gold leaf on the quadriga poised over the high front portico glistens in the sun, a bright smear of precious metal that seems radiant, lit as if from within. The parking lots on the top of the hill are all deserted, a few cars in the official stalls not available for the general public, but the rest of the spaces vacant. There’s some construction on a featureless building tucked under the crest of the hill, an expanse of plastic stretched between stanchions to keep the snow out of the site, a few pickups and front-end loaders, the sound of a power-drill and some blue-green porta-potties inside the temporary perimeter fence.
The only vehicles moving on capitol hill are State Patrol cars that prowl the lanes. It snowed heavily here a week ago, again an unseasonable storm, that left eight inches on the sidewalks and intersections, but, except for some stubborn patches of ice, it has all melted. On top of the hill, there is a walkway that leads to an overlook, a pad of concrete cantilevered over the sheer hillside. To the west, the Ramsey County hospital complex rises in tawny heaps of brown and beige brick, vaguely Babylonian terraces built up against the hillside. Saint Paul’s center with its nondescript skyscrapers is below – the overlook terrace is on the level of the 30th story of those buildings rising over the cold industrial chute where the river runs. On the facing hillside, the basilica of St. Paul stands at the highest point, the bronze dome like a gemstone set in a complicated ring of pointed towers and buttresses. Everything is visible today and the city glints with a dull persistent sparkle on its bright surfaces, the far away hills all dun and matte, an autumnal landscape of bluffs and bridges that doesn’t catch or harbor the light.
Overlooking the city, I think about some of the times when I came here years ago. As a little boy, my father brought me every two weeks to the big public library, a square vault of marble above a park where old drunks with yellow whiskers slept on steel benches. The drunks are gone now, but the fountain where a cast-metal Indian maiden with smooth bronze shoulders skipped across a watery pond remains. Once, I brought a girlfriend here and we saw the Indian God of peace carved from translucent travertine at the intersection of spotlights in any otherwise obsidian-dark atrium, an ebony vault in City Hall. The downtown skyscrapers have Art Deco facades, carved from Kasota stone on which tradesmen with hammers and wrenches are wrestling with the brute stuff from which the world is made. I thought of the many operas that I attended in the theater next to the downtown library and the park with the hapless Indian maiden on stepping stones in the mild flood. I recalled a party in the old Federal building, another place with a big dim atrium surrounded by balcony corridors with iron balustrades cast to imitate vines and flowering bushes. In an ornate courtroom in the building, a friend was married. Once at the St. Paul Hotel, I looked out a window to watch the Winter Carnival Torchlight Parade pass – the boom of drums and the hiss of flames inflating pinioned hot air balloons dragged in the procession as if they were the booty of some exotic foreign war, trumpets sounding fanfares in the streets slotted between the big old buildings. There were many other memories: court appearances down the hill and in the capitol building itself, St. Patrick’s day with the streets crowded with people drunk and hilarious, the beggars in the skyways during a sleet storm, the park with the Indian maiden adorned with towering ice sculptures during the Winter Carnival, a Bruce Springsteen concert at the downtown auditorium and a wild night when I heard the Ramones play in a punk bar on the river terraces.
I walked downtown, descending the hill along the barren quadrangle of grey-brown winter-killed lawn. The whole city was empty. On a hike of eight blocks or so, down to the shopping center of St. Paul, I encountered only four or five people. Most of the doors seemed locked and the store fronts were boarded shut. Even the downtown churches, doors marked that face-masks were mandatory inside, were padlocked. In a hotel lobby with access to the skyway, I hitched a couple escalators to a third-floor lobby with a silent restaurant, apparently open for business but deserted. At the end of a long corridor, I saw someone pushing another person in a wheelchair. But there were no other signs of life. It was as if everyone had fled the City after first carefully locking its doors and posting plywood in all street-level windows that could be readily broken. A few cars slid over the streets between the buildings, and a light-rail train crept forward, also strangely muted, I thought, cruising between stops where no one was waiting.
I suppose the pandemic has gouged out the people who were once here. The bars seemed mostly shut and there were no crowds milling around the lobbies near the elevator banks in the skyscrapers. Everything seemed comatose, motionless, the banks of high windows unpeopled, a chyron with yellow letters snaking around the facade of the public TV building, the news from elsewhere moving in the direction of time’s arrow, but no one to behold those reports of victories and defeats, the intersections all windy and vacant.
Back on the capitol hill, I approached a strange plinth, as tall as I am, but without a statue. Deeply incised in polished granite were the words COLUMBUS DISCOVERER OF AMERICA. The square pedestal was smooth across its top, an altar accessed by some marble steps embraced by an elaborately carved stone balustrade. A State Patrol car with a dozing cop was stationed about 20 feet up the hill from the ruined monument. During the rioting after the murder of George Floyd, a mob with torches tore down the figure of Columbus and dragged the bronze statue over the quadrangle yard, where the explorer’s shoulders and head tore into the lawn like a plow breaking sod. Nothing remains to loot now, but a cop is standing guard, easy duty it seems on this silent afternoon.
19.
I drive back home on two-lane highways that curve around hills and valleys where the corn is ranked, indomitable, it seems, in the frosty evening and mostly not yet harvested.
Trump is scheduled to appear this evening in Rochester. Air Force One is supposed to land about 5:00 pm. Biden is campaigning in a parking lot near the State Fair Grounds. Because of the covid surging now in Minnesota – the State has recorded its highest infection levels ever in the last two days – the Democrat’s rally takes place in Falcon Heights, at a big parking lot next to the sci-fi space tower and white monorails of the State Fair grounds. The radio records Biden’s voice sounding a little thin and weary with a constant background of honking cars. The rally was scheduled as an invitation-only event with vehicles spaced between orange cones in the big parking lot. But Trump’s supporters can drive around the block outside of the fenced lot and lean on their horns and so the sound of the thing is that of an old man’s voice, more or less, constantly drowned-out by high-pitched fanfares of honking car and truck horns.
The background to Trump’s rally is complex. Rochester is the home of the Mayo Clinic and the city is always full of fragile people treating advanced and exotic cancers. Therefore, the city can not afford to be the nexus of a “super-spreader” covid event – the way that the media typically describes Trump’s unmasked, crowded, and raucous campaign rallies. So the city and its airport (which is probably partly owned by the Clinic) orders that attendance at the Trump event be limited to 250 participants. Trump wants a show of force and claims that there are 25,000 people willing to come out into the cold and wind (in the midst of a pandemic) to support him. Trump’s stump speeches are increasingly formulaic and delusional and the outrage has worn off and so the message of the event is primarily the size of its crowd. Aghast at the crowd limitation, Trump’s managers announce that the rally will take place in Dodge Center on private property.
Dodge Center is about thirty miles from the Rochester airport, an intersection in the country where there are several large-scale sheet-metal fabricating plants. Garbage trucks are built here by a family-owned business run by a enormously wealthy family of Seventh Day Adventists. The patriarch of the family, a stout old man with a belligerent disposition, is nicknamed in this neck of the woods “God McMoney”. (I know a little about the family because I have represented some businesses at the periphery of their empire. Once, the scion of the family, a big beefy guy with a fine head of grey hair, took me for a ride in his red Porsche sports car.) When the business owners felt that loans were too costly, they simply acquired a banking business, not just one bank but a whole chain of lending institutions across the upper Midwest. Then, needing some capital, the family sold its ownership in the garbage truck fabricating business, retired debt and took dividends of many millions of dollars. Of course, the transaction wasn’t feasible except with a non-compete agreement and so family members agreed to not compete with their old enterprise for five years. In that time, they bought up thousands of acres of agricultural land and built a vast wind farm of closely spaced aerial turbines. At the end of the five year non-compete period, they built another factory on the outskirts of Dodge Center and, then, commenced vigorous, even predatory competition with the business that they had formerly owned, again building fleets of garbage trucks – you can see these ranked in huge formations, casting long shadows in the evening sunlight, on the edge of town.
Members of this family are big, robust, larger-than-life, fantastically conservative and patriotic. In their headquarters in Rochester, they have an entire gallery of religious-patriotic objets d’ art – God hovering over the founding fathers as they sign the Declaration of Independence, Washington kneeling in the snow to pray at Valley Forge, Lincoln ascending into heaven like some sort of bearded black rocketship, astonishing stuff executed with consummate skill and horrifying to look upon. (The frames of some of these pictures, gilded with semi-precious gems, are treasures in themselves – probably worth more than the best car that I have ever driven.) Therefore, it makes perfect sense that these folks would host Trump’s rally and, indeed, open their vast preserves in Dodge Center for the affair. The President could appear with a backdrop of four-hundred garbage trunks in solid phalanx behind him or under the spinning, blinking ranges of dozens of wind turbines. The news reports that 25,000 or more people are planning to descend upon little Dodge Center, a village in the middle of nowhere with about one-tenth of that number of people permanently in residence. But this gathering also would violate the Governor’s Mandate that group events be limited to 250 people. And, one supposes, that the empty country between the Rochester Airport and the factories in Dodge Center, highways passing through corn and soybean fields, under low wooded hills, might pose some logistical or security problems. The Trump campaign has been widely mocked for stranding thousands of supporters at an airport near Omaha and it’s colder in Minnesota with narrow roads in Dodge County and lots of sinister country lanes and, in fact, most probably the estimate of 25,000 supporters gathering for the rally is vastly optimistic given the cold weather, the late hour, the darkness, and the covid stalking the land. There’s a lot of vacant country around Dodge Center, big enough space to swallow even the largest assembly and make it look small under the turbulent umbrellas of the colossal wind turbines, and, so, after some considerable confusion, the Trump campaign announces that it will (reluctantly) convene the rally at the airport, under the terms of the Governor’s decree. So 250 people are admitted to a runway on which tables and chairs have been set and the President’s plane drops down out of the windy gloom, the sun now setting in a dome of radioactive red light to the west, and Trump’s supporters, not admitted to the airport grounds, line the cyclone fences, waving flags and banners and shouting insults, pressed maskless and cheek to cheek. The president stands in the cold at his tribune and says that the Governor of Minnesota is weak and cowardly and that the State Attorney General has conspired to limit the size of this gathering and that it’s the duty of all good Minnesotans to vote to “liberate the State” from the governor’s mandates, particularly since the Covid virus has been defeated and no longer threatens anyone with the backbone to resist the disease.
The State has posted the highest death figures ever reported due to Covid. The hospital ICU’s are close to being swamped with desperately ill patients. The positivity rate in the State is now 16 percent – this means that sixteen percent of those tested prove to be carrying the virus. About 3,000 new cases are reported on a daily basis.
Trump’s reasoning is narcissistic: “I’ve had the Covid. So you can too. Follow my lead into the abyss.”
On the backroads, deep in the country, it’s dark now. Behemoth harvesting machines thunder along the right-of-way. Against the last red light of the sunset, you can see semi-trucks harvesting corn, vehicle-silhouettes perched along the scarlet thread of the horizon. At Hayfield, a sixty-foot pyramid of golden corn is augured onto the ground next to elevators too small for the harvest. The corn is spiraling out of the augur straight from the grain drying furnaces and columns of steam rise from the yellow flanks of the corn-pyramid. Then, the full moon rises like a huge hot air balloon over the horizon and hangs over the stubble of the harvested fields, a great corn-yellow puffball magnified by the lens of dense air at the edge of what we can see.
We are now in the dark center of the pandemic.
20.
Covid cancels Halloween. Pumpkins rot in fields. When night falls, a tremendous wind surges through the trees scouring off the last leaves. Indoors, it sounds as if the house is enveloped in a waterfall. The next morning, while walking my dog by the Congregational Church, I come upon a Snickers bar, still wrapped lying in leaf litter strewn across the sidewalk. The fifteen-foot inflatable monsters on the lawn next to the home where the Nazis live are flat on the grass, black and ghost-white deflated plastic tubes like huge condoms over which withered leaves blow. At nightfall, a bonfire is burning in an alcove off the alley way and two witches with green faces and rivet-shaped warts are sitting on folding chairs gazing into the little orange pile of flames.
21.
“Jobs not mobs,” a TV commercial for the Republicans proclaims. A beautiful Golden Retriever carrying an American flag in its mouth dashes toward the camera, running at the point where the surf picturesquely brightens the beach. This image is followed by a shot of a crowd of sinister-looking thugs attacking a chain-link fence, throwing themselves against the barricade like zombies. Police cars burn and some black-clad protesters try to light a flag on fire, apparently, without much success because Old Glory resists, seems inflammable, but, in the next shot, a monument to some great man is burning, incongruously burning because who would have thought bronze could be ignited...
22.
Joe Biden will win the election. The mainstream media takes no chances. Although a number of lurid stories about Hunter Biden’s corruption have emerged, even the Wall Street Journal isn’t willing to cover them, let alone the Washington Post and New York Times. In 2016, there was a last minute story widely covered in all media outlets about Hillary Clinton’s emails – I don’t recall the details any longer (this is a century ago in terms of political news), but the Director of the FBI went public with an accusation against the candidate and, later, pundits, seeking to excuse their own errors in predicting the outcome, blamed those revelations for the Democrat’s defeat. This seemed improbable at the time, but no one wants to repeat that error. Accordingly, the corruption allegations are all shoved aside at this point, nothing reported in any legitimate or respectable news source; best not to even whisper about this. But the repressed will always return and I suppose that, after Biden’s victory, when the news is stale and uninteresting, the whole thing will be litigated fiercely in default of anything else interesting to report and, of course, the cycle of reprisals requires that the Republicans mount endless hearings on the subject and, even, ultimately vote for articles of impeachment. This is the mandate of the fanatical partisanship that now rules the Republic.
22.
Joe Biden will win the election. His troubles will start when it becomes clear to the electorate that he doesn’t have a ‘magic bullet’ for the Covid infection. If the vaccine doesn’t work – or, more likely, is rejected by most people as unproven and dangerous – then, the burden of this pestilence will fall on him. Trump’s campaign slogan about the Covid virus has been that there is no such infection. More rationally, his surrogates have argued that no one could have done better containing the virulent airborne infection: the disease is unconquerable. And this may be true. For months, everyone has acclaimed the official response to the illness in Germany and France. But, now, Germany and France have shown a sharp rise in infections to the extent that it appears that despite all efforts the Europeans can’t control the virus. This doesn’t bode well for the United States where almost nothing has been done to contain the infection and where, indeed, a solid 40% of the public think that the sickness will simply vanish after November 3, the date of the election. Biden’s problem is that he is overpromised – in his term, he will need to end the Coronavirus, slow climate change, stop flooding on the Gulf Coast and Florida during hurricane season, end fires in the West during drought, reform the Supreme Court, and end police brutality along with systemic racism. These tasks might prove to be a tall order for any President let alone the feeble and enervated Joe Biden.
23.
But, nonetheless, Joe Biden will win the election. America isn’t noble and she isn’t good, but we are lucky. No one invades us and no world war has been fought on our terrain; Pickett’s charge failed on the third day at Gettysburg; neither the Communists nor Fascists ever found much of a foothold here; the American empire was feeble and our colonialism not as lethal as some European forms; our entertainment products are better than those produced elsewhere; we slaughtered our indigenous people before the world could take note and level accusations against us, a genocide committed while European nations were likewise engaged in the same enterprise in Africa and Asia; our military is largely inept (a good thing) and, although we have lost all our recent foreign wars, this has taken place faraway and with few consequences at home; citizens are religious but not too religious; most of the nation remains vacant and, so, there are empty landscapes, many of them impressively beautiful, that provide us with, at least, the psychogeography of hope; we’ve avoided race war (so far); instead of freebooter bandeirantes, our frontiers were settled by pioneers; most of our factories are still functional and, at most levels, our Judges are not up for sale to the highest bidder; inflation is under control and one day the virus will be gone. America isn’t good but she has been lucky and, I think, our luck will prevail in the election tomorrow.
November 2, 2020
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