The Electron Pencil

Honestly, I don’t know what to do.

It’s been a month since the Plastic Emperor has taken over this holy land. And, make no mistake, he has indeed taken over. This is his country now, no matter how many well-meaning folks spout platitudes about democracy and The People and all the other civics class bullshit. The checks and balances that have occasionally worked throughout our history are now mere annoyances for him. Just you watch as he defies orders, contempt of court rulings, sanctions, injunctions, and every other hammer at judges’ disposal and says, essentially, What the fuck are you gonna do about it?

He will. The Brennan Center for Justice this month published a neat little article on what the courts can do when the Emperor flips them the bird. It all reads comfortably but, like any bedtime story, it’s fantasy. As a last resort, the courts can sic the US Marshals on him and his mob but do you really want to bet he wouldn’t then mobilize the military to thwart them? I wouldn’t.

The man is now drunk with power and the party he slithered from is petrified of crossing him. That party controls the House of Representatives, the Senate, and most of the nation’s statehouses. The US Supreme Court has been in his back pocket ever since the grotesque Mitch McConnell gamed the constitutional nominating process, twice. Don’t even pretend anymore: the Plastic Emperor owns all the levers of government as well as you and me.

So, what do I do about it?

My erstwhile party doesn’t seem to offer much hope. The one thing the Democratic Party has failed to do since the P.E. and his trophy consort descended from his Trump Tower Valhalla in June 2015 is create and maintain a solid plurality of voters. The party I’ve identified with all my life (even as I held my nose most of that time) has been more obsessed with painting the words “Black Lives Matter” on pavements or coercing corporations into allowing employees to offer the choice of He, She or They in their email signature blocks.

And, by the way, nobody gets away with dropping the N-bomb anymore. This, even though most corps.’ board rooms and upper-level managements remain pale as fish bellies.

No, the Dems seem to have forgotten that, to win elections, they must hearken back to the lessons they learned in kindergarten, that 2 is more than 1, that 3 more than 2, and so on. In other words, election winners have to garner more votes than the losers do. The Democratic Party in this 21st century has been far more interested in telling potential voters they want nothing to do with them. As I wrote a while ago, when the people of West Virginia wondered how they’d make a living if the coal mines were closed Dems labeled them anti-environment or when people responding to the Black Lives Matter movement cried All Lives Matter, rather than saying, Hey, I’m glad you agree with me!, those on my side of the fence called them racists.

The Democrats, the Left, the Progressives — all of whom I consider nominal soulmates — have worked harder to shun potential voters rather than embrace them.

So, back to my original conundrum: what do I do? My gut instinct is to tell MAGA voters to go to hell. Especially those who, as some reports have indicated, are experiencing buyers’ remorse. I wanna scream, What’d you expect, dummy?! But then I remind myself that numbers win in an election, and if people who voted for the Plastic Emperor want to switch sides, well then, come on down!

And, the truth is, many of the grievances and dissatisfactions MAGA people harbor are the same as my gang’s. We mutually despise billionaire tax evaders, high grocery prices, unaffordable rents, $4.00 a gallon gasoline, government waste, what used to be called “limousine liberals,” wealth inequality, tyrannical bosses, nitpicky regulations, wages nobody can live on, and…, and…, well, I could go on and on.

The Democrats could have put together an unbeatable coalition had they not been so dead set on enforcing philosophical purity. (By the way, the hackers and bots in the employ of Russia and China did their part to splinter that potential voting bloc with their social media misinformation campaigns.) Had the Democrats been more focused on strengthening their numbers than, say, forcing Al Franken to resign the Senate because of some dumb-assed video he appeared in years before, maybe we wouldn’t be ceding America to the MAGA Mobsters today.

I’m not saying all the MAGA-ites would have been welcomed. No, the white supremacists, the sexists, the homophobes, the Christian Nationalists, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the militia members, the Moms for Liberty, the Identity Evropa/American Identity Movement, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Westboro Baptist Church, the Family Research Council, the Aryan Nations, the Ku Klux Klan, and the American Patrol — all of whom are in thrall to the Plastic Emperor, can indeed go straight to hell. But their numbers still do not constitute a plurality of the voting populace. The non-radicals who normally vote Republican, who, frankly, aren’t terribly comfortable with the Plastic Emperor as Leader of the Free World, just might have helped stem the MAGA tide.

Rebecca Watson, whom I usually agree with, published a podcast this week titled, “No, I will not Welcome Ex-MAGA to the Resistance.” The title says it all. Some of the comments endorsing her stance include:

They had a name for Nazis that were only Nazis because of economic anxiety or similar issues. They were called Nazis.

The most infuriating thing about this is that people have been speaking out against Trump and his actions for a literal decade now and yet the people who voted for Trump three times are acting like there was no way to see it coming.

“I didn’t realize oppressing you would hurt me too”

And so on. All true, largely. Nevertheless, my side will never win unless we hold our noses and say to erstwhile MAGA-ites, Hey, join us. I think. At least right now.

When I went through chemo-radiation therapy for cancer in my neck, I marked the posts on this global communications colossus journaling the ordeal with the label My Olive Pit. That, in fact, is what the malignant lymph nodes surrounding my larynx felt like. And, yeah, I should have called them My Olive Pits, plural, but from the time I sensed the first one growing in me — I found it while in the shower and, at that moment, every hair on my body stood straight out with the seeming bristle of steel wool — the singular just sounded right. Here’s the logo I developed for that series:

And when I’d type in the label, I’d place a little trademark superscript next to it — like so: My Olive Pit™ — which tickled a lot of my readers. The whole idea was to treat the thing with as much humor as I could muster. In fact, when I learn about friends and acquaintances joining the Cancer Club, I advise them to find the humor in it as well. Jokes, irony, laughter, and amusement can be found there. They can be found anywhere.

When people fear they may soon be staring death in the face, humor just may deter them from speeding that appointment along by their own hands. Indeed, cancer can make us want to throw ourselves necktie parties. Even when the doctors tell us the treatment is coming along fine, the pain, the discomfort, the nausea, the grossness of it all can make us want to lament, Dang, I’d just as soon not wake up in the morning.

Squeezing a touch of humor in among the constant tears and gnashing of teeth is a survival mechanism. It worked for me. And should you ever be informed you’ve joined the Club, it may very well work for you.

Anyway, I was diagnosed in November, 2015. From that moment on, I was examined, treated, studied, fussed over, palpated, zapped, poisoned (yes, poisoned; what do you think chemotherapy is?), sliced open, glued, stitched up, probed, prodded, jabbed, punctured, and a hundred other unpleasantries by no fewer than 15 different doctors. That’s the way these things go.

Let’s see, there were my…

• Family practice physician (who pegged the Pits as cancer)
• Ear, Nose & Throat specialist (otolaryngologist)
• Pathologist (who examined the cells in my lymph nodes)
• Radiation specialist
• Oncologist #1
• General surgeon (to implant my drug port)
• Gastroenterologist #1 (to examine my throat, esophagus, and stomach for irregularities)
• Gastroenterologist #2 (to insert a feeding tube into my belly)
• Dentist (my teeth had to be in top-notch condition before radiation would start)
• Periodontist (my gums, too)
• Cardiologist #1 (to make sure my pre-existing genetic heart malformation wouldn’t complicate things)
• Oncologist #2 (because Oncologist #1 was on vacation)
• Cardiologist #2 (because Cardiologist #1 moved)
• Cardiologist #3 (because Cardiologist #2 retired)
• Oncologist #2 (because Oncologist #1 moved out of state)

The whole shebang continues to this day. And I really mean this day; I saw my ENT guy — a big Cubs fan, BTW; he’s got posters and pix of Wrigley Field and Kyle Schwarber on his office wall — this morning. My oncologist and my ENT guy alternate with each other, one and then the other seeing me every few months. They feel around the outside of my throat, they dig with their fingers under my tongue, they look at all sorts of scans and X-rays. The ENT guy occasionally shoves a hose up my nose, down my larynx, and into my trachea to make sure no new Olive Pits are growing there. Oh, sure, his nurse sprays my nasal passages with local anesthetic but I still gag every time he jams that little hose in me. After a while, a cancer patient learns to accept these kinds of intrusions with a shrug.

Before every single visit with one or another doctor, I fret. Sometimes it’s just a general fretting. There’s a background dread that cancer will reappear in my neck or will develop somewhere else. Hey, one of the primary causes of cancer is radiation exposure. Ironically — humorously ironically, I might add — I was strapped under a linear beam accelerator, a multi-million-dollar ray gun, every weekday over a six-week period during radiation therapy. It was hoped that the ray gun in conjunction with the poison (okay, chemotherapy) would blast the tumors into smithereens. The cure might well become another cause if my luck runs out. So there’s that worry.

Another is my nearly constant search for new lumps. I run my hands over any and all bodily locales that might get cancerous when I’m in the shower, in the car, in my recliner, hell, sometimes in the grocery store, looking for the next Olive Pit emergence. You’d be shocked how often I find little lumps, suspicious but minuscule irregularities on a bone, in some soft tissue, on my tongue, anywhere really. So, I wring my hands until the next time I see either my oncologist or the ENT guy. Sometimes the lump is scary enough that I call for an unscheduled visit. The doctors insist I do that and I’m happy to because if I don’t, getting a good night’s sleep becomes problematic. I ought to play the Lottery because so far, knock on wood, none of the little lumps has been proven malignant.

Alright, so I’m now nearly five years into this mess and, yep, five years is the generally accepted length of time the cancer experts call for treating and monitoring my particular cancer. After my chemo-radiation therapy was completed in the spring of 2016, I was declared in remission. And, lemme tell you, hearing the word remission after all that was like being told I’d won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and a lifetime free pass to every pizzeria in the nation.

This coming November will mark exactly five years since I was diagnosed. If my luck holds, the next time I see my ENT guy, he’ll tell me I’m cancer-free, and that’s the official term for it. He’ll still want to see me every year for the rest of my life but that’ll be cool. It’ll be like visiting with a fellow soldier who shared a foxhole with me. I ought to bring a bottle of bourbon in for those visits.

The years 2016 and 2020 are the bookends in this five-year struggle. That first year (I don’t count ’15 because I found out about my cancer so late in the year) I suffered through treatment, rejoiced at its effectiveness, went delirious when my Cubs won a World Series, and then fell into a funk when You-Know-Who was elected to the presidency on a technicality six days later. What a year.

Yet ’16 was almost as nothing compared to 2020. There’ve been natural and man-made disasters galore, a pandemic and lockdown, a recession bordering on a depression, street rebellions, and even a Saharan dust cloud sweeping over the country. Yet come November I might be declared cured of cancer and that You-Know-Who knucklehead just might be evicted from his palatial Washington DC digs. What a rollercoaster this year may be!

I can only hope 2021 turns out to be a bore. I need a little rest.

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Her eyes filling with tears, Charlotte Zietlow says, “I feel terrible about all this.”

The longstanding doyenne of the Democratic Party here in Bloomington found herself smack dab in the middle of a maelstrom over the weekend. In a clumsy effort to show solidarity with the Enough Is Enough marchers who gathered at Dunn Meadow and then paraded to courthouse square Friday, Charlotte displayed a sign on her balcony railing reading, “This old white lady says All Lives Matter.”

The all-lives-matter variant on the Black Lives Matter is generally viewed as a Trumpist, racist response to the call for justice and equity by people of color.

Charlotte tells me she was unaware of how hurtful the all-lives-matter line is.

She might have known that had she been an habitué of social media. Alas, she’s not. Charlotte can’t see well enough to read her computer screen these days. Now fast approaching her 86th birthday, she’s struggling to remain a step ahead of the inevitable physical breakdown we all will be subject to. Charlotte keeps abreast of world and national events via her TV, always tuned to one or another of the political news and talk channels when she’s not indulging in watching tennis or soccer games. A voracious reader until a few short years ago, she’s now only able to gobble up audio books.

All the latests dos and don’ts many of us learn through Facebook, Instagram, or whatever other instant communication platforms people use today zip right past her. The cable channels, MSNBC for instance, don’t run breaking news chyrons warning the populace that the all-lives-matter thing is taboo (as well it should be).

Charlotte found out the rules of that game the hard way. Almost immediately after the sign was hung on her railing, Charlotte’s phone began ringing. Friends and colleagues, including members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, wanted to know what in the heck she was doing. As soon as her faux pas dawned on her, Charlotte had the sign edited to read Black Lives Matter. That might have been the end of the tempest but activist and a candidate for Bloomington’s city council last year, Daniel Bingham, posted pix of the original sign on his Facebook page.

The reaction was swift and passionate. Commenters suggested she was losing her mind, that she was suffering from Alzheimers’, that she’d been hoodwinked by her caregivers, and even that she was a longtime racist. One fellow, I’ve been told (I did not see his comment), allegedly said her balcony windows would be an easy target for anybody who wished to heave a rock at them. If this person did indeed post that or a similar comment, it would immediately be taken down for violating FB’s violent speech guidelines.

Knowing Charlotte as well as I do — and, I might add, in a way that the most vehement of the commenters under Bingham’s FB post do not — I’ll guess her original message was in keeping with her lifelong belief that we’re all in this together. She became politically active with the rise of John F. Kennedy and cut her activist teeth in the era of the hippies, anti-war protesters, and civil rights marchers of the 1960s and early ’70s. Power to the People, was a favorite line at that time. Black Power might have seemed too divisive for her tastes. All of us are being screwed in one form or another, so let’s not single each other out; let’s, instead, fight the power as one.

That take rankles a lot of people of color these days. Their allies, too.

But that’s only a guess. I will say for certain though, after working with Charlotte for the last six years on her memoir, that she’s as sickened by the mistreatment, the dehumanization, the abuse, the inequity people with dark skin suffer daily, hourly…, hell, by the second as the most vociferous 22-year-old marcher last Friday. She, like me, is unable to walk well enough to join the dramatic, historic protests. We’re both deeply disappointed because of that.

The only difference is I’ve caught on via social media how inflammatory, how wrong, the line All Lives Matter is. Charlotte, again, has come to that chapter of civics class late. Tardiness, of course, does not mean one has lost one’s mind.

And if she is racist, she’s as racist as I am, or any white American, inasmuch as we all were born and raised in a profoundly racist society. I’ve been trying to shake that virus for more than 60 years and I’ll bet I’ll still be doing it by the time I quit this world. That’s how deeply ingrained white supremacy is in us. But Charlotte is no more racist than any of the white marchers Friday nor any of the passionate, enraged commenters under Danial Bingham’s Facebook post. As much as they’ve hollered, rightly, for justice, she’s written and enacted laws, she’s ordered local government agencies and departments to change their ways, she’s spoken to neighborhood groups and political caucuses, for that same justice for people of color.

A little more background on the sign genesis: the caregiver who Charlotte directed to draw up and hang the sign originally declined to do it. “I don’t feel right doing this,” she told Charlotte.

Late this afternoon (Monday) a friend who spoke with Charlotte before the sign was drawn up, posted this comment under Bingham’s FB post:

I happened to speak with Charlotte by phone before the march began. Her intention and her heart was to participate in the march because she cares profoundly about Black Lives Matter. It was all that we could do to persuade her to stay home because of the pandemic. Since she could not go to the march, she asked me if I thought it was a good idea if she were to hang a sign from her balcony that said; “Old white lady says Black Lives Matter.” I told her it was a fabulous idea. As some of you know, her eyesight is failing and she had help making the sign. In the course of the sign’s making, something was lost in translation. Charlotte’s intent was to stand for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Confusion, to be sure, reigned. Perhaps a directive was misspoken or misheard. The incident shouldn’t negate all the good Charlotte’s done since she came to this town in the summer of 1964.

And, for the ten thousandth time, the people on my side of the fence have to — have to! — stop strangling each other.

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I’ll cut to the chase before it even begins:

1. The court of public opinion does not operate under the rules of the courts of American law. Nor should it.
2. The people we elect to office should be held to higher standards than the rest of us.

That’s the stuff of today’s Pencil. Now here’s the stuffing. The IDS has reported that three figures in Brandon Hood’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for Indiana’s 9th District seat in the United States Congress have resigned and are calling for Hood to drop out of the race. One of them, a volunteer, has charged that Hood sexually harassed her and then acted in a threatening manner when she told him to buzz off. The alleged incidents were witnessed by Hood’s campaign manager and an organizer. All three have severed their relationships with the Hood campaign and have called for him to quit the race. The Bloomington police have been notified of the accusations but no criminal charges have been filed.

Brandon Hood

One of the local organizations supporting Hood, the Rose Caucus, has withdrawn its endorsement, acc’d’g to the Herald-Times. (My search for a website for the group turned up no results.)

Joey Bollings of the IDS reports the campaign volunteer claims several other women have come forward on social media to accuse Hood of sexual harassment since the alleged incidents came to light earlier this week.

The Volunteer’s Facebook Post.

Thus far, Hood is keeping mum regarding the developments. Hood appeared on my WFHB radio interview program, Big Talk, in 2017, when he was running for the Democratic nomination for the seat the first time. In both campaigns, he has positioned himself as a champion for the working person and a political outsider.

Hood, Laura Lane of the H-T reports, has had a couple of scrapes with the law the last few years. He was charged with theft and possession of a controlled substance in September, 2018. A woman for whom he’d done home repair work claimed he’d stolen some prescription medications from her. Hood agreed to a deal in that case, pleading guilty to misdemeanor public intoxication and paying restitution to the women. Earlier this year, he’d been placed on probation for a separate case of public intoxication, for which he is serving probation until July.

A Subsequent Facebook Post by the Volunteer.

The story brings back memories of the Amanda Barge contretemps in early 2019. Barge, then an up-and-comer serving in her first term as Monroe County Commission and already a declared candidate for the Democratic nomination for Bloomington mayor, was reported by the IDS to have pressured a county contractor for sex and romance. The contractor had recorded Barge pestering him for an intimate relationship. Barge was forced out of the running for the nomination and subsequently resigned as Commissioner. A licensed social worker who ran her own practice here, she moved away from the area later in the year and has established herself in another state.

A Democratic Party activist has written on social media: “Let’s not do the Bloomington thing where we seem to feel the need to destroy people.” It was a comment under a post linking to the IDS story about the charges against Hood and was an obvious reference to the earlier Barge incident. Another commenter, noted for frequent political statements on social media wrote: “Like how the community destroyed Amanda? Sick of double standards…” A different commenter, referring to both the Hood and Barge situations characterized Bloomington as a “hate culture.”

Hood had been an administrator of the private Facebook group in which the above comments were posted. He has since been removed from that position.

These objections and characterizations might be valid if the accusations against Hood and Barge were hearsay. I have heard unflattering anecdotes about both Hood and Barge in the aftermaths of the accusations against them. I won’t recount them here because they are indeed so much hearsay and, on the part of several accusers, sour grapes. Truth is, I’ve never given these particular accusations much credence.

Why? Simple. None of gossipers was able to offer the slightest evidence for any of their professional and/or official charges. No one was able to produce written documents or recordings to back up their assertions.

Hood’s actions as laid out in the IDS article were observed by three separate people, at least one of whom reported them to the police. The three were not Hood’s enemies or antagonists. In fact, they embraced him to the extent that they either were employed by his campaign or volunteered to help him get elected to public office. A careful reading of the article and of both the volunteer’s and one of the campaign employee’s statements indicate that up until the very moment of the incidents, all three gave Hood their loyalty and trust. It was, they say, only Hood’s actions and his subsequent refusal to apologize or even acknowledge them that caused them to turn away from him.

Were this a jury trial in Monroe County Circuit Court, we’d need more, definitive evidence to convict Hood of a crime. To be sure, the Bloomington police have determined there isn’t enough evidence to bring criminal charges against him in this case. But they — and the courts — operate under more stringent standards than the voters do.

Same with the Barge story. She can be heard pestering — even pressuring — the county contractor on the recording. Copies of her text messages to the contractor along those lines also were presented in the original IDS story. Again, a savvy defense attorney might easily persuade a jury that none of this was enough to return a guilty verdict against her. The attorney would be correct; guilt can only be arrived at beyond a reasonable doubt.

The stakes in a court of law extend to putting the guilty in jail, ordering them to do community service, and/or slapping them with punitive fines. These are real retributions that we in a (purportedly) just society wish only to be visited upon those who have been found, again, beyond a reasonable doubt, to have broken the law.

But our court, the court of public opinion, isn’t so hamstrung. We want our public officials and candidates for elective office to be innocent beyond a reasonable doubt. When three friends of a candidate attest that he’s done something wrong, it’s eminently reasonable for us to believe them. When we can listen to a recording and read a politician’s text messages implicating her in exerting the power of her office over a county contractor for personal benefit, it’s reasonable to conclude, yep, she did it.

That’s not too much to ask. Our loyalty to, and our preference for, any particular candidate should indeed be free of doubt. If we should turn against Hood as many of us turned against Barge, he won’t go to jail. He won’t have to give up a year of weekends or vacations to pick up garbage at the side of county roads. He won’t have to pay a hefty fine. He’ll simply go back to doing what he’s been doing all along; that is, making a living as a private citizen.

And isn’t that precisely what happened to Barge? She’s not confined to a jail cell; she continues to ply her trade, albeit in another state.

All we ask for is exemplary behavior from our candidates and elected officials. Those who run for public office had better be certain their houses are in order. Hell, I wouldn’t run for office; there’d be a dozen or two things in my past I’d have to either explain away or do my damnedest to conceal. Nobody’s perfect, me especially. But I’m not so oblivious to think my mistakes, my idiocies, my peccadilloes, and my harebrained life of the last 40 or so years wouldn’t make an awful lot of voters think long and hard about my fitness for office.

Ideally, we want people better than ourselves to be our leaders and our representatives. That doesn’t sound like hate to me. That sounds like good sense.

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There’s a reason things, actions, hopes, dreams, schemes, plots, and plans can be called impossible.

If, by calling them impossible, you’re looking at them through an unjaundiced, unbiased eye and you’re not engaging in hyperbole, you do so because reason, reality, the twin fascisms of nature and human behavior, and a good bettor’s eye will tell you some things simply can’t be.

I can’t walk through the brick wall that separates my living room from the front yard. Impossible.

I can’t levitate and transport myself to another land. Impossible.

I can’t become a NASA astronaut nor can I become a Major League Baseball player. Impossible and impossible.

I can’t afford to purchase a private jet. Impossible.

Can’t Do It.

Other things have been called impossible, wrongly so. Back in my hometown, for years and years any number of people would say, quite confidently, that the Chicago Cubs could never win the World Series. Impossible, they’d say. They were wrong. The year 2016 was their comeuppance.

That same year saw the ascension of an unprepared, incurious, self-absorbed, amoral, inexperienced, crass, mean, unread, obsessively greedy, pathologically lying, reactionary bully to the presidency of the United States. Funny thing was, the idea that such a thing might occur was never called impossible — at least accurately so. It was a joke, sure; Matt Groenig saw to that. It was unlikely, of course. All the polls leading up to the election indicated that. Political/social/cultural odds touter Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight told us on the eve of the election that a Clinton victory stood a 70 percent chance of coming true. That looks like a prohibitive favorite but it wasn’t. It meant Clinton stood a hair better than a 2-1 chance to win. Donald Trump, under that scenario, had a 30 percent chance of emerging victorious.

Not impossible. If you bet on Trump winning, sure, you’d be buying the long shot. But the reason people take risks on long shots is, every once in a while, they pay off.

Here’s another proposition that’s not impossible: the Democratic Party could put up a progressive, scandal-free friend of labor, an advocate for universal single-payer healthcare, a responsible environmental steward, a candidate pledged to topple the stacked economic deck that funnels ever more wealth into the hands of those who have it already, a passionate protector of the consumer, a cheerleader for renewable energies, a fighter against Citizens United, an adherent of established scientific research, and countless other attributes dear to “our side.” The party could run that person — say, a black Puerto Rican lesbian who grew up in abject poverty but worked her way up by dint of hard work and an unerring focus on what was right and fair, a graduate of Harvard who’d served as head of a global NGO that brought food, medical care, and education to poor children on every continent save Antarctica.

Could that person win the November, 2020 election for president? Y-y-y-y-yes. But the chance that might happen are vanishingly small, comparable, in fact, to the chance that I might walk through my living room brick wall, a potentiality advanced physicists tell us is…, well, actually possible. Here are some comments made by physicists on an online discussion forum asking the question, “What is the probability of a person walking through a wall based on quantum mechanics?”:

• The probability is non-zero, very small, but non zero.
• It’s a number which isn’t zero but is too small for any computer to even begin to calculate.
• It’s so low that if our entire universe were composed of copies of yourself and walls dedicated to attempting this feat from now until all the neutrons in the universe decayed, we still wouldn’t realistically expect to see it happen.

Get the point? Something can be possible while simultaneously being impossible. Call it Schrödinger‘s Morning Line.

Erwin Schrödinger: A Tout For The Ages

That straw candidate I described above would make a lot of people happy. Perhaps millions of people. But to win a national election, you must make tens of millions of people happy. Or at least not nauseated.

I’m thinking of Joe Biden. He doesn’t make tens of millions of people happy but he does, indeed, make that many not want to spew projectile emesis around the room. And that’s what’s needed right now after nearly four years of the Trump circus. We need someone who reminds us of gentler, more civil days.

I, for one, would vote for that straw candidate in a heartbeat. But I am certainly not the average American voter. That candidate would scare the bejesus out of too many people. I’d loved to try to persuade them that she would be the best thing ever to happen to them but it’d be a thankless and ultimately failed task. She may even be the candidate of the future, perhaps in 2028 or ’32. But not now. Not today.

We’re not going to see the “revolution” this year. For now, what Americans want is to relax. To take a deep breath and not have to worry about their blood pressure every time they go online or watch TV news. For the next four years, we want to take a break from high noon politics.

Joe Biden, that blithe, doddering, familiar, wired-in pol who’ll keep his liver-spotted hand steady on the tiller until 2024 or such time as his creaky ticker goes out, is the guy for now. And it may be that his running mate — be she Kamala Harris, Val Demings, Stacey Abrams, or whomever — will be the president seeking to be reelected in ’24. Who knows when the chess-playing wraith will challenge him to a game?

It’s Time, Mr. President.

In any case, this coming presidential term will be a transition and not a revolution.

We revolutionaries have a lot of work and a lot of planning to do over the next four years in order to make our candidate’s chances a tad better than those of me walking through a wall or becoming a NASA astronaut.

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