The Dark Matter

I was not looking forward to the third presidential debate. Like a lot of people, I was thinking "what could possibly come out of this that would be helpful to me at this point?" I've known for whom I'd be voting from the moment Donald Trump won the nomination. To be honest, there weren't any Republicans I would have felt comfortable casting a vote for, so maybe it seems a little disingenuous to single him out, but in fairness to myself, it wasn't me who singled him out, it was a majority of Republican primary voters across fifty states. It's not like you didn't have other choices. And to be fair, the most prominent challengers turned out to be two turnips from Florida with no discernible political communication skills and an extended family of gila monsters wearing a man suit. And to be even more fair, as brash an un-politician-y as Trump was through the early process, maybe we couldn't have predicted just how reckless, cavalier and disdainful of democracy as an idea Donald Trump turned out to be once we separated him from the cover of the herd. After all, we only had 50 years of public life to draw examples from.

Plus, I'd seen the first two debates. I knew Trump was down in all the polls and that he needed a dramatic showing in order to rally his fortunes. I had no confidence that he was at all capable of that kind of a performance. We'd seen him alone at his rallies, in his full pomp, strutting and gesticulating, doing that weird pinchy gesture he uses to either (almost literally) underline a point OR pick a loose hair off America's face before it falls into and ruins the shit soup of an election we're all about to force down. He operates with an odd power balance between himself and an audience, whipping them up with canned rhetoric, then letting their passions drive him to just the right ad-libbed riff of OTT horseshit, a game of demagogic ping-pong that usually ends with everyone there loudly agreeing that the place they live is a shitty, burned-out shell of what it was or could be (because of Democrats) but at least they can all be glad it wasn't the terrible inner city, where 100% of black people live.

The debate format is just not conducive to that style. Without the guide-rail of symbiotic goading between performer and audience, it's down to exchanges with just Hillary Clinton, whose debate prep was so intensely in depth, it apparently included a graduate-level seminar on human social disorders because she piloted him remotely like a kamikaze missile drone, straight into the side of a mountain carved into the shape of his giant, puffy head. After the second debate, I read some complaints that she hadn't gone for the jugular. In the end we realized that would have been redundant; he'd already bled to death from a thousand thousand needle punctures.

And yet, if facebook is any guide, there are still some who insist that he's the only choice. The reasoning of course is getting more and more irreducibly exorcism-y in its imagery as there's nothing left of corporeal substance to hide behind. The argument is that no one should vote for Hillary because a) she's an actual demon or b) Jesus says so. The reasons for the Jesus arguments are a bit light on the details with regard to New Testament prescriptions for Trumpism, but it basically boils down to the obvious revealed truth that God is a Republican. This cannot be challenged or gainsaid. Not because it's true, but because this is an argument made of fundamental emotional bedrock. Logic may be built on top of it, but never through and certainly not under. Trying to talk someone out of this position will only lead to their growing concern for the safety of your immortal soul. And that's the best case scenario.

As a rationalist, an agnostic, a borderline socialist and a patriot, my first instinct is to tell these people: maybe voting isn't your thing. Maybe you just don't have the emotional capacity to handle decisions like this if that's how you're going to insist on framing it. Votes really are valuable, especially if you believe in those bumper stickers I would never buy about freedom not being free or "land of the free because of the brave" or whatever. I really do believe the right to vote has been bought with blood. Certainly not in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam, but the lives given in our Civil War and Revolution are still far fresher than we actually remember, obscured by the violins and fifes and slow pans over sepia photos on History Channel infotainment documentaries.

But I don't really believe anyone should sit it out. The fact of the matter is that voting is for everyone. Literally everyone. And I mean "literally" in the modern sense, as in "really a lot" and not in the literal sense of "literally" because that would include loads of people who are, say, infants or lunatics or (statistically most likely) either Chinese or Indian.* Those people shouldn't vote in American elections. The rest of us should. It may seem pointless or useless, but those are sometimes actually the point. Does your vote do nothing but cancel out some other lunatic's vote? Yes. Yes it does. And we kind of really really need it to. Every vote is matched and essentially nullified by one for the other party in a two-party system. A vast supermajority of votes have null real outcome on the election... until one side runs out of matching votes. And if there are still votes to count for the other side, regardless of the motivation or intellectual honesty or rational capacity of the voter, those constitute pure profit. Those are the margin of victory. If it helps you can delude yourself into thinking yours is one of those ones in the black, boosting up the electoral bottom line for the lady you voted for, fine. I prefer to think of mine in pure nihilist terms. Every vote I cast** adds up to the sum of zero against a passionate soul who thinks Barack Obama is a secret Muslim. The rest of the result I'm happy to leave in your precious, capable hands, snowflake.

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*One in every three humans, it turns out.

**Over multiple years I mean. We Dems don't actually participate in voter fraud. Well, maybe we used to, but not lately!