Swing States

All evidence to the contrary, it actually takes a bit of time to put one of these posts together. That's right, all the typos and logical shortcuts and facile, insupportable rhetorical horseshit is actually the result of someone making an effort. And because I'm a procrastinating, self-hating layabout, it usually takes place well into what really should be bedtime on a night before I know I will have to get up and work the following morning. What I'm saying is: sure, it's often not very good, but at least I'm paying the highest cost possible for it.

As my kids have gotten older and more prone to just straight up forget I exist for hours and hours on end, I've found that I do have more opportunities than ever to get started earlier in the evening, granting myself at least the bare possibility of getting to bed at an hour that won't result in deprivation-related sleep psychosis. And sometimes I actually do it! There have been days where I have found myself finished with all the easy dick jokes and tenuous-as-fuck ideas in a barely-there framework by, like, 6 pm and I have the entire rest of the evening to indulge some of my more frivolous hobbies, like YouTube videos about other people playing video games and my psychological terror campaign against myself.

Tonight was VERY NEARLY one of those nights, but just as I turned on my creaky old MacBook Pro and let it sit for the good 6-8 minutes it takes to boot up, I remembered: a thing that was scheduled to happen this year was about to happen on the day it was originally scheduled to happen. It took me a good several minutes to really sit with that idea and let it sink in, but yep: this was the evening the Democratic nominee for president was going to give his (turned out to be a "his," a disappointing change from the last one) acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee.

Of course not everything was business as usual. For example, the speech wasn't even in Milwaukee. It happened in Wilmington, Delaware, which apparently is not a fictional city made up by, like, DC Comics as a stand-in city the way Gotham or Metropolis stand in for New York, but in this case, more like a proxy for maybe Bristol, Connecticut. Just like it's possible to meet actual humans with the pretend-ass name like "John Smith," a city with a name as violently nondescript as Wilmington, Delaware, actually exists. I've learned something.

I thought it would be irresponsible not to wait until I watched the speech to sit down and write anything. Plus anyone in this game knows: events equal free content! It was either write about the speech or try to gin up a topic out of thin air again, and nobody wants a repeat of the *NSYNC incident from last year.

OK, when I say "watched" the speech, I was within earshot of the TV as it happened. I have a lot of trouble containing myself when something this potentially momentous is happening. The stakes are so high, I can't help but pace and fidget and occasionally vocalize, shuffling and twitching like a video game zombie.

And from what I heard, I thought it turned out... pretty OK! I spent an earlier part of the day reading comments on a much more professional blog where real, committed, ideological leftists screamed at and scolded regular progressives, throwing around "liberal" as a slur like it was 1988 again. Biden, you see, like Hillary before, is just another disappointing centrist who betrays the left he should ostensibly represent by steering toward something as crass and shortsighted as electability.

That last observation I made, uncharacteristically, without sarcasm. I'm pretty leftist myself, definitely to the left of Joe Biden on several issues, but I'm also just old enough to have come of political age at the tail end of the Democratic down cycle that stretched from Hubert Humphrey to Michael Dukakis, with a couple of historically epic McGovern and Mondale-shaped craters in the middle. I want to run with the very angry progressives who have the confidence and the luxury of forging their disappointment into grievances they can wield against the people more likely to give succor to their wants.

Again, there is no sarcasm here. I understand the frustration of living in a country with no real left-wing representation at any level of politics. Our two-party system is much more deeply ingrained and institutionalized than almost any other industrialized democracy. The path out of the morass of scripted political conflict over decades of what is effectively a power-sharing agreement between establishment establishments is impossible to see for all the weedy chaff of soundbite conflict.

But more than anything, I'm sad to say, I'm afraid of losing. The things I want and the things I think are the gravest threats to the health and safety of my fellow citizens (reliable government-provided health care, guarantees for labor rights, real demilitarization, true gender equality, a federal-level commitment to combat racial injustice, meaningful anti-trust oversight, renewable energy prioritization, a million other things) aren't really meaningfully being broached by either side. But if there's anything about me that can be characterized as conservative (small "c"), it's definitely my political risk aversion, made all the more acute by 2016 and compounded by literally every single fucking thing that has happened on every day since.

I'm happy to fight and complain about the Biden Administration every day after January 2021. But I have to be able to make it through November 2020 first. That's just how calendars work. I know this is a trap I've laid for myself, though. Because every time a president wins, his party loses seats in Congress in the following midterms. So as much as I'd like to think, first step President Biden, next step Workers' Utopia, I know I'll be dragged right back down into compromise and endless, endless patience as it becomes crucial (again) to win in 2022 and then 2024, all other priorities be damned.

I know that's how the system perpetuates itself, by generating these narratives of danger. And selling the danger as "well, sure, I notice the pattern, but this time, it is actually crucial that we win first and worry about ideals second." But no, seriously, you guys, it does really feel like this time we have to win first. Next round we'll totally re-evaluate, I promise.