Shadow Government

***BORING PROCEDURAL NOTE***

Right up front, I had someone point out to me that since the good Blogger people have parted ways with FeedBurner, which used to handle notifications for subscriptions, emails weren't going out when I posted something new. There didn't seem to be a lot of good or easy (you can read that as "free" if you want) options to fix it, so I created a Patreon page. I'm not looking for money, but I think if you follow for zero dollars and I remember to cross-post there a link to new blogposts here, you can get email notifications that way. It's a bit convoluted, but we're talking about the limits of my web-design savvy here, which stopped developing somewhere before the first Obama administration.

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It wouldn't be appropriate to say I have a stalker, but I have had an unsavory character following me around for a few years now. Decades, even. I've tried to put distance between us, even moved to another county for a while, but it's never long before I can feel the eyes on me again, the looming presence, the damp breath on the back of my neck.

Well, not my actual neck. The part of my neck that votes in stuff. My voter neck. There's maybe a way to save this metaphor by talking about the "body politic" but that's like a societal thing and not a literal single person, so it still doesn't really work. Besides, the person I'm talking about doesn't seem to take particularly good care of themselves, so there's no real possibility the first association anyone would make would have anything to do with how remarkable his body is. I'm not shaming anyone for their looks, I'm just saying in a lineup of 100 average American males, he's indistinguishable from at minimum 87 of them.

This person is my duly elected congressperson and professional gross dipshit Ken Calvert. I'm not posting any links to him or pictures of him, but I don't really need to. Just close your eyes for a second and imagine what the personification of corruption would look like in 2022 America. Now imagine it with a 12-year-old boy's haircut and you've basically got him.

I voted for the first time in 1992, when I turned 18. I thought I'd lucked out, being able to vote in a national presidential election the same year I became old enough to register. All the years before that when I voted for pay under the names of dead people were a nice side hustle, but I knew this time it was really going to count for something. The gig economy used to be very different.

Underneath all the noise of the Clinton campaign, to the sounds of pretty generic saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show and what would these days almost certainly be a cease-and-desist action from Fleetwood Mac, there were of course the down-ticket races locally here in inland Southern California. It also happened to be the first year Calvert ran for Congress, a local then-still-amateur gross dipshit from Corona, the same place I was living at the time. Apparently he was some rich people's useless kid who made some money because his parents knew people in real estate out here, a deeply forgettable origin story that manages to score points for being both foreboding and catatonically unoriginal. Essentially the same as Donald Trump, minus the clown makeup, stage presence, political instincts or the courage of his fucking maniac convictions. The last one is hard when you don't have convictions on any measurable scale.

And when I say convictions, I am including the ones he was eligible to pick up for things like, say, public sex with a prostitute in 1994 or a string of acts in office leading him to be recognized as one of the most corrupt sitting members of Congress. This being America, that's basically the resume for someone who has since never lost an election.

After high school, I moved a bit east to the other side of the city to go to college at UCR. Not far enough, still Ken Calvert. Then I got into grad school and moved out to Orange County, after which redistricting came up with some kind of crazy-ass cherry-stem-in-a-knot-looking district shape that straddled the Santa Ana mountains, which meant: still Ken Calvert. Then I moved back to Riverside County in order to live like a person instead of a house-poor mole-rat: same guy. And now in 2022, wearily, in my (I think) 16th chance at voting for Congressional representation, this fucker is still kicking around, still on my goddamned ballot. All the places I used to live, where he'd followed me around? Yeah, other people represent those lucky fuckers these days. Actual Democrats representing the slow but inevitable deliverance of OC and parts of Riverside County from decades of benighted Reagan Country-itis as we become more fully part of the woke commie gay-agenda casual-abortionist stereotype most of the rest of the country imagines California to be.

In order to get there, this time Calvert is faced by Will Rollins, a young, handsome, openly gay prosecutor* whose prosecution targets have included Jan. 6 insurrectionist dummies. The new shape of the district also includes parts of the Coachella Valley like Palm Springs, among the gayest places in America. Between the leftward drift of the electorate and Calvert's very unremarkable history of open political homophobia through the '90s and 2000s when that was very Republican de rigueur, we might be on to a winner.

I know after the post-Dobbs poll spike, we're supposed to be looking more pessimistically at Democrat chances in Congress in a few weeks, but... well, I almost said "I don't care," but of course I do. A lot is riding on it, not the least of which is how apoplectic it makes Republicans to say "Speaker Pelosi." But the saying is "all politics is local," by which I think they probably specifically meant local politics? Local politics is local. I may be taking that too literally. What I'm saying is I hope Rollins wins. It would feel like the political equivalent of a restraining order.

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*I mean he's an openly gay man who worked as a prosecuting attorney, not that he prosecutes the openly gay. Though I guess he would if they committed a crime and there was enough evidence to indict.