Swing for the Fences
Or—as we like to say in the whitewater world—Go Big, or Go Home.
A friend of mine is listening to “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” on Audible and he is eager to tell me about it. I ask if he sees parallels between those times and these. He says, “Yeah!”
Emphatically.
I’ve started into Sarah Kendzior’s page-turner, “Hiding in Plain Sight”. She is a student of authoritarian regimes. She spent time in Uzbekistan following the fall of the Soviet Union. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, mother of two, and for most of the past decade she has tried to sound the alarm on the state of the American union by showing up on cable news channels whenever they’ve felt the need to have someone speak to how Orwellian our country has become.
I am fascinated with the breadth of her knowledge about the last president’s long, sordid past and how it all plays into America’s turn toward something other than democracy. If you’ve heard her podcast GasLit Nation, you’ve probably been turned off by her strident voice. Especially because the podcast is typically an hour and a half in length. Take my word, her writing is so much more accessible. So much more en pointe. Her writing—even about something as noxious as anti-democratic forces—is delightful. Readable.
I listened to Frank Luntz—the Republican pollster—being interviewed by Kara Swisher on the podcast, Sway, lament that Republicans are between a rock and a hard place with the former guy. In Frank’s mind, and according to his focus group polling, the GOP can’t win with the former guy, and they can’t win without him.
He is confident that—if the former guy is the nominee in 2024, and he will be if he hasn’t croaked or been thrown in prison—that the former guy will lose.
I’m not so sure, and I would never hang my hat on any prognosticating three years out.
Between the blasé day-to-day humdrum of the Biden administration, voter suppression laws popping up around the country like fields of mushrooms and the physically draining nature of the last four years, it seems unlikely the forces for good will be able to rally folks to vote with the same fervor we witnessed in 2020. Not in the 2022 mid-terms, which is where we are desperately going to need everybody to vote as if the end is near.
I am writing today to remind you how close America came to being run by an autocrat for the unforeseeable future.
Biden won the presidential election handily if you look at it one way. It was a squeaker if you look at it another way. Forty five thousand votes the other way in two or three states might have allowed an autocrat to remain in office for another tortuous four years, possibly more. Because, if you haven’t noticed, the former guy is not just the GOP’s standard bearer.
He is their god incarnate.
Even after surviving an assault on the Capitol, more than a handful of conservative senators and almost all of the conservative representatives voted to deny the Electoral College results. It makes me wonder why they didn’t welcome the mob with ‘open arms’, allow them to take liberal and moderate lawmakers hostage. It would not surprise me if some of them rue the choice they made that day to run and hide and not stay in the chambers and help conduct the kangaroo courts.
Also remember, for the first time in modern history, the GOP had no platform at their presidential convention. The GOP platform was whatever the former guy wanted.
I wrote previously about the number of Americans who prefer authoritarianism. They’re still out there. They haven’t had their minds changed. If we have to entice them to get a vaccine with hundred dollar bills or cheap seats at the Mariners, imagine their obstinance in regards to their love affair with the greatest liar and showman on earth. The 70% of white Americans who voted for the cult of personality could care less about the system of government because they don’t think it will ever affect them. As long as they can move freely about, consume themselves to death and have access to never ending online content, they’ll be happy.
Just like Sunnis in Iraq probably cared less while Saddam Hussein, a Sunni himself, played dictator.
I also watched a NowThis ad/infomercial/news on one of my social media feeds whose topic was vaccine hesitancy. A young woman told her story of how she came around to deciding she would get the vaccine. She ended by saying, “I decided to look beyond myself.”
Eureka! That’s it in a nutshell.
There are those who look beyond themselves, and there are those who don’t.
So, I titled this column ‘swing for the fences’ because that is what needs to be done by all of us who are capable of looking beyond ourselves. Our current government in particular. While we have it. While there remains a glimmer of what could be. Americans are looking for big, bold “moon shots”. They’ve longed for action and change for decades—and they’ve swung their votes back and forth searching for a political messiah—and now is the time to deliver.
I think I am just going to send the same message to my representatives over and over and over for the next year. It’s going to read, “I want bold, decisive, outside-the-box ideas. I want action, movement, time dedicated to bringing about justice and leveling the playing field. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it has taught us that incremental change is never enough. . .
Swing for the goddamn fences and let the chips fall where they may.”
Fascinating.
The dog lovers in the new administration are legion. Politics Insider says there is—at least—10 dogs whose humans are in Biden’s Cabinet. Since Politics Insider’s article is behind a pay wall, I’m not going to link to it but, suffice it to say, there are pics of a bunch of good boys and girls and cuties.
