Intimations of Impending Doom

Diary of a mad morning:


1. On the treadmill, "New Day" reviewing early voting trends in North Carolina: Early voting is up 50% among whites compared to last year, up only 15% among Blacks. Inference: Blacks are not coming out to vote for Hillary as they did to vote for Obama. You need a big Black vote to win North Carolina.
2. Driving in: NPR report on two reporters, one in England one in Pennsylvania. Town in coal country where everyone is voting Trump because "Hillary wants to kill coal. Washington has forgotten about us."  Brexit voters say the same thing about London. The elites in London are doing well and we are drowning in immigrants.
Inference: Trump is the American Brexit. He's the disrupter.
3. NPR report on a woman canvassing in Manchester, New Hampshire. She asks to speak to the wife, who she has listed on her computer spread sheet as a potential Democratic vote. Man answers the door says, "Nobody in this house is voting for Hillary. We're Trump. She should be in jail, for what she did. Shouldn't even be allowed to run. She belongs in jail."
By the time the canvasser has finished knocking on 39 doors, she has spoken with only one voter who wouldn't say how she was voting and the man who knows Hillary belongs in jail. And this is using what the Democratic party's computer says is a list of Democratic voters.


So much for the value of a "ground game." 

Why should I care?  Will my life, personally, change with President Trump? If the Ku Klux Klan marches down Lafayette Street, how will it affect my life? 
If the scoundrels and racists and Muslim, foreigner haters take control of the government, the Music Hall will still have concerts. I can still take the C&J bus to New York City and see my kids.

My father returned from a trip to Spain, years ago, when the dictator, Franco, was still in power. He was dismayed at how happy the Spaniards looked. "They're living under a dictatorship and they look happy!"

El Duce, not Franco--Mussolini

I imagine, if you lived in Austria, for most of the 1930's and even into the 1940's your life continued to be pretty pleasant, as long as you were not a Jew or a Gypsy.
Symphonies still played, operas still got sung. People went out to beer gardens and for hikes in the mountains.

You will say the odor wafting into town from the concentration camps must have unsettled the happy little blonde lives, but Americans keep their nastiness at a distance--in Gitmo, in the great empty spaces of the far West.
It's just an election. Just a government. And what Mr. Trump's supporters are reminding us is we don't need no freaking government.