Tuesday 3.31: I forgot it was election day

The post originally drafted for this Tuesday was composed of more than 1,500 words on a pair of sneakers I may or may not have ruined carrying garbage from my back patio to the front of my apartment building. While I maintain that it was a good post, the realization that it would have been published on election day made me rethink it. It’s 3:45 in the afternoon as of this writing, and I can say with confidence that I’ve seen enough “distractions” for the day. Brian Lehrer offered a little relevant levity while I was in the shower, Defector brought some happy cows to my attention, and booze-delivery app Drizly gave me a dark chuckle with their obligatory “Go Vote” email, which included a list of chill-out techniques that were very visibly not drinking oneself into a stupor.

I took the day off and went for a run (It was shitty, but that’s beside the point). I baked some cookies. When that wasn’t enough, I cooked some chili. I looked out the window until I caught a glimpse of the Tufted Titmouse, a newcomer to the birdfeeder on my patio. When I finish writing this, I’ll either walk to the store and pick up my new translation of Beowulf, or read some more of Shelby Foote’s perfectly ok so far novel, Love in a Dry Season.

Life, as they say, goes on. I think that’s the overall message of the distraction.

It’s not hard to believe that it’s been four years since the last presidential election. I think for most of us, it’s felt like a decade. Think of the years of social, economic, and institutional erosion that led to the unrest of 2020, and try to remember that there was an incredibly fraught and dramatic democratic primary in there right before, just a matter of months ago. This administration has done so many awful things that to summarize them would be distasteful. I’m the first to roll my eyes at questionable uses of the term “fascism,” (look, any country that fetishizes the flag and the military as much as we do looks like a fascist state from a purely aesthetic perspective), but the point at which policy borders become indistinct and all that’s recognizable or memorable is an overtone of cruelty and suffering, well, yeah that sure feels like fascism.

Anyway, one of three things can happen:

• Trump gets washed.
• It’s close and we don’t know for a few days, maybe weeks.
• Trump wins.

If I’m a betting man, he gets washed. And I mean just humiliated. Even if you ignore the fact that 250 thousand people are dead and he’s doing some kind of double-jerk-off dance with a Xanny-bar rapper nobody’s ever heard of, Biden bothered to, you know, campaign in critical states and didn’t wildly overestimate his capacity for amity with strangers. Of course, nothing’s ever assured, and options B and C remain very real possibilities, but I’m going to trust the democratic machine on this one. It doesn’t have very much gas left in the tank, but they pulled out all the stops to fuck Bernie, so they damn well better get the job done in the general.

None of this is news to any of you. I don’t have anything to contribute that you don’t already know. So in the interest of keeping things short-ish and sparing you one more thing to absorb, I’ll share this:

After Trump won, I read (along with a shitload of other people) Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, a novel about German resistance to the Nazi occupation and based on the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, the Berlin couple whose simple, handwritten, clandestinely distributed anti-fascist postcards got them executed in 1943. The book’s message is a hopeful one. Resistance succeeds because it resists. Goodness triumphs because it is good. Otto and Elise do not win in any manner that someone like Donald Trump could discern. And, when I’m operating under the power of my normal, cynical motor, it’s hard for me to see anything but senseless violence in the story of a factory worker and his wife who left scraps of paper around a German city because they believed it was right, and were beheaded by a political organization those papers opposed—

Also, please don’t nonchalantly connect too many dots here: Hans Fallada is in no way suggesting that your tweets are courageous political acts—

The triumph in Every Man Dies Alone is in the ordinary. So no matter who wins this stupid election, don’t feel defeated. It takes a little work, but when I look back on the last four years and realize I still look out and see new birds, I feel alright. I feel like there’s a way.