I need to get some copy out the door today to Mike and Jeff. Meanwhile, I’ve been required to participate in a distracting little dust-up with the desk at King Features. Before it’s over, I might end up pulling my byline off the Sunday story I told you about last time. I hope it doesn’t come to that but that’s the publishing business, people have different ideas about it. It’s all good, we’ll work it out.
Today, for what it’s worth, here you have my two cents on the Colossus of Queens and the gravely disappointing outcome of the only poll that counts. What is there left to say, really? The world watches, stunned, as America beshits itself, and the hope of the free world shifts to Western Europe. I didn’t think The Trump Show had the votes but there’s no denying it did, more votes than ever. America returned a man with a chaotic mind to power, a babbling old shitposter, and now it’s the revenge of the fascism nerds, red hats overrunning the cool kids’ table.
Last month, Scott Patterson, a Canadian police-officer friend of mine, earnestly concerned for our country’s wellbeing (as Canadians often are, kindly enough), had an unhappy premonition about the American race to the bottom: that we might have a ways to go before there’s no place to go but up, and only then will we have an opportunity to turn it around, start rebuilding who we are as a people. You might be right, I said, Trump could conceivably win no matter how much I doubt it, but MAGA is a dead-end ideology. We’ll bury it next month, I said, or we’ll bury it four years from now, or 20 years from now, but, like all reactionary political movements, it fails in the end.
I doubt the pro-Trump vote turned on the state of the economy, as many pundits are saying. The economy’s in quite good shape and has been for at least the last year, despite the partisan media drumbeat to the contrary. One out of three voters participating in this so-called bad economy didn’t care one way or the other about electing a president, that has to mean something. I get that the economy’s bad in certain places, the ones where people never get ahead for a whole variety of reasons, not even in boom times, but those are hardly the people who put Trump so comfortably over the top.
No, I think America just wanted Trump, was eager to sign up for his brand of chaos because we live, now, in a society largely made up of non-readers, which is to say, passive learners. Voters across the spectrum are grossly maladapted to screen technologies, devices that rewire how the brain experiences cognition, how it experiences emotion. It started long ago, of course, with what we so quaintly called the boob tube without knowing how true it would be shown to be. TV, Making America Dumber since 1955™ Now we have these diabolical little screens in our pockets to further meet the demand for entertainment that excites the emotions, the non-reasoning regions of the gray matter. A serial criminal returns to power on he’s Jehu, she’s Jezebel, nonstop nonsense running on a loop, people gorging on it as if they’re a bag of bones just stumbled in out of a wilderness to that Thanksgiving table we’re all about to set. Kamala Harris was hardly my dream candidate, but I did like her dignity, her basic human decency, she had that working for her. She’s a good person. That would have been enough for me. I’m easy to please. Give me four more years of decency in the Oval Office.
As it turns out, I’m in the minority. More of us want to be excited by reruns of The Trump Show, even if they are falsely billed as all-new episodes in the 2025 channel guide—the Project 2025 channel guide… See it on a screen near you in these here United States of Amnesia. Someone once said that by the time you’re 50 you have the face you deserve, the face you made for yourself by making it every day. The same is true for the brain, that’s a fact. That’s science. Remember facts? Science? The organ physically adapts to what you put in it. Once you’ve made it into one thing, it’s the work of a lifetime to make it into another.
Voters who find this vain shell of a man entertaining outnumber those of us who find him pathetic, but before he’s done venting his rage on our country, I suspect a great number of his voters will get shy about copping to their enthusiasm. They will, one day, distinctly remember having been somewhere else on Election Day 2024.
How does a mind this defective get a foothold in the nation’s life? I have a theory, not sure how good it is, that we were psychologically primed for this sort of demagogue by the Cold War. Specifically, by the myth that America won the Cold War. We didn’t win. All we did was prevail economically, which, you know, talk about the American way of looking at things—money as the measure of everything—who does that sound like? Trump may be a symptom of the particular way in which America did its share of the losing. The loss wasn’t economic for us, as it was for the Soviets, but spiritual; not in the religious sense of the word but more like the fiber of a people, a vulnerability at the core of things. The Soviets, of course, got the double whammy, economic and spiritual exhaustion, which is why the Russian Federation is what you see before you today: starts a war on its border, can’t staff its military, can’t build its own weapons, gets its prison population wiped out, needs to go for help to the likes of impoverished North Korea, man, when the Russians lose—they lose! Us, we may have exhausted our souls in the war, yeah, but look at all these shiny consumer products, they make you happy, don’t they?
Okay, if that doesn’t impress you, here’s another theory that makes at least as much sense as the approved abracadabra. Let’s imagine we live in a moral universe after all. Not the moral universe they beat into you when you were a kid and your neural pathways were fresh and being formed and now you’re stuck with it. More like a law of nature, or the machinery of the cosmos itself, a not-so-golden rule of blowback, a karma, whatever you want to call it. What if you simply can’t get away with slaughtering a few million Vietnamese because you have an upside-down idea in your head? An upside-down Cold War idea, you follow? What if you can’t impose tyranny on Guatemala, tyranny on Chile, tyranny on Iran, crimes like that, because it stores up a measure of misery for you to one day bring down on yourself. Think about it: For you to one day bring down on yourself. Well, if that’s how it works, Trump is positively delighted to be the agent of our comeuppance, even at his advanced age, the slump-shouldered sack of nuts. That was pretty much his campaign, wasn’t it? Give me power so I can get revenge. Well, watch out, red hats, everybody is dispensable to this sociopath.
Ever the optimist, I expect that, in the fullness of time, Trump’s incompetence will be the key to our salvation. Until then it’s just, you know, on we go we go we go, the hoopla, the hoopla. The oil & gas donors promoting willful ignorance on the climate, the religionists who want women put in their place like they were in this or that ancient text, small-c christianity, whatever you want to call it—those voters won. They won, we lost, and, unlike them, we know a fact when we see it. As patriots, we’re not the sort to unleash mob terror on the Capitol, or to celebrate (or pardon, as he will) criminals who do.
The victors in this election have never known the difference between waving the flag and flying the flag. Let us now, more than ever, fly it.
Now the resistance begins. We engage, on every lawful front, the present MAGA peril.
Tony DePaul, November 7, 2024, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
I am surprised Elon isn’t complaining about the daily strip. It is dead-on, and I am loving it.
Thanks, Bob. Mike and I are having fun with it. I didn’t expect the guy to take such a high profile in the campaign, the story was written before he did so. He kind of accidentally made it look as if we know what we’re doing. If he were to make Hearst a rich-enough offer, I’m sure he could have the pleasure of firing me and Mike! Hearst might want to unload a couple of newspapers along with the syndicate… we’re in the newspaper group currently, were moved out of the entertainment group about four years ago (In anticipation of a sale, I thought. Hasn’t come to pass. At least not yet.)
If the name sticks—people around the world start calling Elon Musk Ian Mollusk—yeah, Mike and I are probably toast. 🙂
Hi Tony,
Thank you for the wonderful wrap-up. It IS hard to imagine there are more of them than us, but this is not the first time I’ve felt this way (being 76 and all).
Good luck with King Syndicates, you will always take the high road and do the right thing for the family and you.
I’m flying my flag. Waving is for bad home movies.
Brad! Looking forward to meeting up with you at Speed Week 2025—Bonneville, here we come.
Ah, Tony, while I defend to the death the right you have to express your opinion, I cannot and will not accept the world view you present.
First, I am pro life; I inherited that from my mother [a USO girl of 17 in 1944, who met a USMC lance corporal, had a one night stand and I was the result]. Mom had the opportunity to abort me, chose not to and for as long as I have been cognizant of her choice, I have been pro life.
Second, I hold strongly to the biblical values you have apparently discarded. [My uncle Dave having been a Chaplain for the Jewish Brigade fighting with the British forces in WW2, being my main influencer] and I am a strong supporter of Eretz Israel and its people.
Lastly, for this message, this was not a contest of personality or persons for me, it was a close examination of platforms, policies and polity. Which party held most closely to my world view and my view for the future of this nation within it.
For me, the Republicans ticked off the right boxes. Apparently, they did so for many others.
Hey, Roger, thank you for writing. I’m completely in favor, of course, of all your issues having their champion on the ballot—they should have! I just wish you had a better human being to represent the positions that are important to you. For me, it would be a stretch to believe he wasn’t about to do the weave on any given day and start ticking a whole other set of boxes. But we’ll see what happens in these, our interesting times.
I love that your mother told you the story of how you came to be—that makes me smile from ear to ear. Wonderful! She sounds like she was quite the personality. I love that honesty, and somehow I get the sense the romantic encounter wasn’t confided to you as a secret never to be spoken of but just, here it is, here’s what happened 🙂 Am I right?
That was one of the best post-election essays I’ve seen this week. I hope your long-term optimism is justified.
Thank you, Ed. Me, too.
Good luck with things at work, Tony. As usual, you’re spot-on with the causes for our election outcome. I feel bad for Kamala and all the people who worked so hard to try and get her elected. She did pretty damned good given the late start she had. I’m still in disbelief that he’s in office again. But hey, we’re still the same people and country we were yesterday, and we shouldn’t give up hope.
The Supreme Court’s King should have been prosecuted, convicted and in jail three years ago. He wasn’t and so here we all are, condemned to live in interesting times.
Hi Tony, I read your blog being a Phantom fan and I hope you get your by-line sorted out, Phantom has been my first read every morning for years, also keep the Mollusk plot running please!
Think you are spot on re the election.
I’m from the UK and believe me this is going to hurt us hard as well. I’ve got various friends in the US and their Whatsapps are full of anguish.
At the last (good result) election you suggested playing “Send money guns and lawyers” by Warren Zeavon III as a finger up to Trump. Sadly this time R.E.M’s “Its the end of the world as we know it” seems more appropriate.
Ride on and fly that flag!!
Good luck.
Bill
Ha! I had forgotten about the money, guns & lawyers thing. I’ll have to go back and see which post that was. Great song!
Thanks for reading, Bill.
As much as I hate to say it, being a father who, like you, raised only smart, clever, and happy girls, but how much of what happened Tuesday was because the majority of people who voted weren’t ready for a woman President?
I’m disgusted that I even have to think this way, but in our patriarchal society, I think that had something to do with her loss.
Oh, I think it had to, Dave, absolutely. Enough to matter, certainly.
I hope you’re able to settle with King Features and keep your byline. It’s such a shame that it’s come to this for you, but I hope all ends well for you.
I love the flag on your porch, it’s a beautiful sight.
As for the astounding election, I pray for calm in the coming days and I loved Biden’s speech today. And we desperately need smarter pundits and pollsters.
I wasn’t aware the President was speaking today, Ellie. Thanks, I’ll take a look.
Thanks for sharing your musings, Tony. My thoughts are that there are a number of different groups who voted for the orange baboon. The ultra rich, who benefit from the rise in the stock market and the profits from monopoly companies. The “Christian” nationalists who want to control women’s bodies. The angry men whose lives are in the dumpster and who want someone to blame, and punish. The true MAGA hat believers who literally see him as a savior. The ‘normal’ people who have been fed the ‘news’ line about the ‘Biden economy’, and who truly feel the pinch of inflation. Racists/Sexists who voted against having a black woman as POTUS.
Kamala got a late start and was tainted by Biden’s deterioration. She is a decent person, as you say, and ran a strong campaign. But the tide was against her and people’s minds were already made up; they were never going to switch sides. The Democratic Party needs a reset, a strong message, and new faces. I have no answers, and I fear for our country.
A reset for the Democrats, indeed, Jon. I wonder how much of this mayhem historians will assign to Bill Clinton and his embrace of Republican aims on globalization in the 90s, his part in shipping manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries. The GOP’s radical-left Clinton, right?—from Arkansas! well-known hotbed of progressive ideas.
I suppose Trump voters must say, well, Clinton wasn’t working with our kind of Republican, it’s not our kind of Republican who took our jobs away and decimated our communities; the Clinton Democrats were in with those Establishment Republicans we hate so much.
Just look at who is running Canada at this time. Consider your self fortunate
Ha! Well, we’ll see about fortunate. I did hear some Trudeau material from Janie recently, she’s with you on that, amigo.
Glad to hear you got your new roof and chimney built. Will hope to see you in BC again one of these years soon. If if you’re up for another ride east, I’m learning all the good dirt roads in Vermont, a thousand miles, easy. We’ll have a blast.
Thanks Tony. I love the distinction between waving and flying.
I’m embarrassed for Harley guys lately. But they’re my people. 🙂
My comments on the state of the economy. The economy is fine, if you measure it by the stock market. In ancient times, the typical American benefitted when the stock market was strong, because jobs and wages were strong. But today, a strong stock market doesn’t mean much to the working class. They’re living paycheck to paycheck, often working more than one job, wage growth isn’t keeping up with inflation, benefits suck, and it was time to throw the bums out. If things don’t get better in four years, the working class will throw the (different) bums out again.
Good point, and funny you should say that, Vic, because just the other day I got onto the Fidelity website, a thing I might do once a year if I think of it, and I couldn’t believe how much new make-believe money is in my retirement savings, which I doubt I’ll ever touch. Where does this make-believe-until-redeemed money even come from? It just keeps growing. Where is this printing press? My balance never grew faster than it did under Pops Biden.
But yes, if I were desperate for day-to-day money, basic needs, I might be vulnerable to misplacing my hope and confidence in a demagogue. I get the non-voter somewhat, and I fully get the drowning man or woman making a desperate reach for any straw, but then the comfortable, educated (make that degreed) voter thinking a man with a chaotic mind ought to have the helm… hard to fathom.
Thanks for following the scribble, Vic!