Nov. 4, 8:30 a.m.: I should tell you, I’m writing this Tuesday morning, Election Day. I want to get it done early because I suspect that I may spend the next three or four days puking.
No, I don’t feel like I’m coming down with a bug or something… not unless there’s a bug called the “Mitch McConnell Shits.” And if there’s not, there ought to be.
It’s just that if the expectations of so many political analysts are realized today, this election will bring forth two years of a circle of Hell unimagined by Dante. After all, how could a simple 14th century poet envision a purgatory filled with people who had willfully voted for their own damnation? How could he describe a Machiavellian monster like Ted Cruz rising into the ruling elite of a civilized society, 200 years before the real Machiavelli was born and 600 years before the first official fascism showed up? How could he ever imagine, living out his years in medieval Tuscany, that millions of citizens of a modern, educated nation would go so insane with racist-fueled rage that they would strike out at the very man whose achievements have elevated their shoddy lives, and choose to return to the septic Republican wasteland from which he lifted them?
Yes sir, for ol’ Dante’s sake, I’m glad he ‘s not around to see this.
Then again… it might not be so bad. We may see the reactionary dream of the total annihilation of democratic decency dashed to pieces on the rocky shore of voter turnout. We may see Mitch McConnell wallowing in his own excrement as Kentucky voters awaken at the last opportunity to the reality that the health care they love so madly actually came from the man they detest so irrationally. We may see the bubonic vermin left behind by the 2010 Tea Party Plague—still toxic in provincial fiefdoms from Florida to Wisconsin and from Kansas to Idaho, cast from office like the lying, larcenous scoundrels they have proved to be. We may see women and minorities flock like avenging seagulls to destroy the scourge of radical crickets (and cockroaches and bed bugs and blood-sucking ticks) that would devour the remaining shreds of the middle class like so much bagged lettuce.
I don’t pretend to know what news the day shall bring. But I want…
No, I don’t feel like I’m coming down with a bug or something… not unless there’s a bug called the “Mitch McConnell Shits.” And if there’s not, there ought to be.
It’s just that if the expectations of so many political analysts are realized today, this election will bring forth two years of a circle of Hell unimagined by Dante. After all, how could a simple 14th century poet envision a purgatory filled with people who had willfully voted for their own damnation? How could he describe a Machiavellian monster like Ted Cruz rising into the ruling elite of a civilized society, 200 years before the real Machiavelli was born and 600 years before the first official fascism showed up? How could he ever imagine, living out his years in medieval Tuscany, that millions of citizens of a modern, educated nation would go so insane with racist-fueled rage that they would strike out at the very man whose achievements have elevated their shoddy lives, and choose to return to the septic Republican wasteland from which he lifted them?
Yes sir, for ol’ Dante’s sake, I’m glad he ‘s not around to see this.
Then again… it might not be so bad. We may see the reactionary dream of the total annihilation of democratic decency dashed to pieces on the rocky shore of voter turnout. We may see Mitch McConnell wallowing in his own excrement as Kentucky voters awaken at the last opportunity to the reality that the health care they love so madly actually came from the man they detest so irrationally. We may see the bubonic vermin left behind by the 2010 Tea Party Plague—still toxic in provincial fiefdoms from Florida to Wisconsin and from Kansas to Idaho, cast from office like the lying, larcenous scoundrels they have proved to be. We may see women and minorities flock like avenging seagulls to destroy the scourge of radical crickets (and cockroaches and bed bugs and blood-sucking ticks) that would devour the remaining shreds of the middle class like so much bagged lettuce.
I don’t pretend to know what news the day shall bring. But I want…