Rubicon, Redux
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, whom you might know from such cultural wellsprings as The Big Lebowski, once said, “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”
Well wait now, actually it was Peter, of Bible fame, who was the originator of that statement, but Karl Marx fattened the assertion up like a calf for slaughter: “Only your small-minded German philistine who measures world history by the ell1 and by what he happens to think are ‘interesting news items’, could regard 20 years as more than a day where major developments of this kind are concerned, though these may be again succeeded by days into which 20 years are compressed.”
What Lenin said was, “there are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen,” an utterance which tells me that Lenin stole from the best and had an excellent editor. Here at Red Clay Bestiary HQ we’re already 150 words deep because I have no editor at all.
Decades didn’t happen last week, but you probably could have squeezed a week and half in there. Orlando Cespedes died. Martin Mull died. Kinky Friedman died. We lost another cat.
That’s right, just a week after our beloved Yumyum relinquished her mortal coil, our dandy little Sapnap, terror of chipmunks neighborhood-wide and the closest we had to a feline with a sense of humor, left the house for one of his traditional walkabouts, never to return.
This was a blow. In spite of the fact that we still have two cats remaining, the house feels strangely empty. Smells slightly better, but that’s small comfort. We reckon he could have gotten snatched by a predator—we saw a coyote in a nearby park just a few weeks ago, and I have occasionally spotted owls of breathtaking size swooping over our backyard like great pterodactyls. We’ve been holding out hopes that perhaps he’d just gotten trapped in someone’s crawlspace or shed and that in due time he’d come loping back, bright-eyed as always and perhaps with a smudge of dirt on each cheek to indicate what a wild adventure he’d experienced, like a 70s movie starlet with a contract rider indicating that under no circumstances would she be allowed to appear as anything less than gorgeous.
But eight days later it’s clear that being trapped in this relentless heat would be far worse than simply being eaten, so let’s hope his fate was rendered quickly. I hate it though. I’d love to hear his chipper voice at the back door, really I would.
Joe Biden also died this week. Not literally of course, but I’m not sure that literally dying would have been worse. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I’ve never seen a more humbling performance from Biden than the one he gave at the debate last Thursday night. Unable to so much as complete a sentence, he seemed to fulfill every slander that the Magaverse has ever conjured up concerning his mental acuity. I know, and probably you know, that the man has a lifelong stutter and should be given the benefit of a doubt when folks start asserting that he’s got a head full of pudding, and to be sure the transcript shows conclusively that his mind was functioning perfectly well, but let’s not kid ourselves that presidential debates are actually debates, any more than Velveeta is cheese. They are performances in which the candidates show us what we’ll be looking at in press conferences for the next four years. This is arguably the least important part of presidenting, but given people actually cast votes for George W. Bush over John Kerry on the grounds that he seemed like the better guy to have a beer with, we can be assured that a) some folks are swayed by these ludicrous charades, and b) these tragically key folks constitute the mealy-mouthed middle that drags the whole country whipping behind them as they meander through a baffling landscape of words and images like monkeys leafing through calculus textbooks in search of bananas.
Biden provided zero bananas.
In the wake of the debate the Philadelphia Enquirer ran an op-ed calling for one of the candidates to step down. The orange one. It really is worth considering how we’ve arrived at a point where the Gray Lady reports on Trump like he’s a normal candidate while running several columns asking Biden to bow out of the race, but to be fair, I too wished to see the departure of Biden after that disastrous event. I would like it to be known, however, that I don’t cover Trump like he’s a normal candidate.2 I’m not even sure he’s human, but what I do know is that he’s a rapist. The felonies are pretty damning but to my mind the rape ought to be a disqualifier not only for public office but the freedom to choose one’s own cellmate. I don’t quite get why every reference to Trump isn’t preceded with the phrase “rapist and multiple felon.”
Let me stress this at the risk of becoming repetitive: the man raped a woman.
This is not a matter of dispute. He may have raped a couple dozen, including minors. Indeed, the evidence for this is pretty compelling, particularly given that he’s actually bragged about sex crimes. But the rape is real and he can’t say otherwise without risking another civil judgement against him. All of this was true, and known, on the night of the debate. How is that not worse than being hoarse and stumbling over a few sentences?
That said, it is indubitably a fraught choice we’re being asked to make, one which needn’t pertain.
Our two-party system comes in for a lot of well-deserved criticism, but it is based on a simple conceit that has been entirely lost probably at least since Newt Gingrich slithered into GOP leadership in the mid-1990s. To wit: Our government cannot function without consensus. We keep hammering the same nail and expecting it to suddenly begin producing electricity—it is not possible for one party to simply dominate or destroy the other, and pursuing such an end is tantamount to pursuing the end of democracy in the United States. Our system might be stupid and might tend to produce the most lackluster outcomes, but it is what it is and as much as I have wished for ranked choice or a true multi-party coalition system, we don’t have that (and it’s not like such systems have not produced their own particular monsters—one need look no further than what’s been happening in the Israeli Knesset to see how coalition government can wind up wobbling on a precipice). In the end, to move forward, we have to have cooperation between parties. It’s mandatory.
This is a profoundly dangerous time, for reasons nobody can control (in spite of Trump’s fantastical assertions that he would have prevented war in Ukraine—all the more fantastical given that the war existed, albeit in a more simmering form, for the entire duration of his so-called presidency), and for one party to be seeking the undoing of the other and the tens of millions of Americans it represents is more or less definitionally un-American. But moreover, the meshing of party with the fate of a single individual is likewise a huge step in the wrong direction. We have parties precisely so that no individual becomes indispensable. And yet here we are facing an election featuring a 78-year old rapist and an 81-year old as though we somehow simply lack, in a nation of 330 million people, the talent to replace them both. It’s like Logan’s Run in reverse. We on the left have no control over the slavish devotion of the Maga right to their rapist king, but we damn well could demonstrate what a healthy institution looks like, if Joe would simply remember he promised to serve one term and then hand over to a capable youngster. The Democratic party has oodles of capable youngsters. They have a cohesive philosophy of governance which everyone understands and to which all subscribe, at least in the broad strokes.
As I recall, Bush Jr. ran his 2004 campaign largely on a contrary argument, that it would be dangerous to “change horses in midstream.” And yet one need only look to that greatest Republican, Abraham Lincoln, to see how false that is. Lincoln changed horses repeatedly: Winfield Scott,3 George McClellan, and Henry Halleck all screwed the pooch before Ulysses Grant made his appearance.
Now, as I have previously griped, current events are a difficult topic given that they just keep fucking happening and even while you’re trying to get your hands on one wriggling, slippery fact in the murky brown depths, another one bumps at your leg and damned if it doesn’t have teeth. When I started this essay, the Supreme Court was still sitting on Trump vs. United States4 as though it might hatch.
Well lo and behold! Hatch it did. Now, there are people better equipped than I to describe to you the ins and outs of the dump the Court just took on the U.S. Constitution, but let me just draw your eye toward the felony counts already dragging behind Trump like Marley’s chains. There’s every reason to believe that, in addition to stabbing the other three cases pending against Trump right in the heart, he now has grounds for overturning the New York decision. Oh yes, these were crimes committed before he was president, but the transcript is not without references to statements and actions he took as president, and in one of the more baffling aspects of the Court’s decision, nothing he did as president is allowed to be used as evidence in other cases.
I simply don’t even know where to reach for words to describe, much less alleviate, the injustice that so obviously stems from this decision. The Enabling Act doesn’t seem like a stretch at all. “The lamps are going out all over Europe,” wrote the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey as his country declared war on Germany in August of 1914, continuing, “we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” It was a prophetic statement, but not that prophetic. The seventh seal had been broken, and all the vermin were emerging.
We have one seal left, and its fate will be decided on November 5th. Apologies to friends and family with whom I disagree, but I am compelled to appeal to your sense of decency and justice. What is happening is not normal. It could well be the end of the Republic. This is not a joke; this is not to be taken lightly. “Owning the libs” is not a path to peace and prosperity. Voting Republican this autumn is tantamount to voting for the abolition of the lion’s share of the freedom and happiness that have prevailed our entire lives.
I wish the Democratic party were going into this election with someone young, robust, unstained, and inspiring. But we don’t always get what we want. It’s time for all people of good faith to put on their big boy pants5 and do what must be done to give future generations a chance at the milk and honey we have taken for granted all these years.
Abe said it better than I ever could, “I almost always feel inclined, when I happen to say anything to soldiers, to impress upon them in a few brief remarks the importance of success in this contest. It is not merely for today, but for all time to come that we should perpetuate for our children’s children this great and free government, which we have enjoyed all our lives. I beg you to remember this, not merely for my sake, but for yours . . . The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.”
Ells are a unit of measure that derives from “elbow,” as it represents a distance approximately equal to the length of a forearm. It is, technically speaking, the funniest unit Marx could have selected for this passage, short of complete absurdities like cubit or furlong.
If we’re being honest, I don’t “cover” Trump at all. I am a computer programmer, not a journalist.
To be fair, Scott wasn’t a bad commander, he was just old as fuck and decided in the fall of 1862 to give way to a younger replacement. Hint hint.
The name of this case is a good description of the last nine years.
Big girl pants, big they pants. Supply your own pronoun but don’t fiddle with my poetry.
My condolences for your second loss. This is a great essay.
You sir, are genius wordsmith.