If He Wins

It’s difficult to see how he wins, if we’re being honest. That is to say, if we’re also being logical. But we do not live in an honest age. Or a logical one.

Still — reality has stacked itself against him. The pattern isn’t good, though patterns do not always hold true, and few of them are forever. Just the same, increased voter turnout has yet so far not rewarded Republicans very much, and this cycle we are definitely seeing increased turnout. Polling, which already slightly seems to favor her, also has been wonkier and wonkier with each cycle, largely undercounting Democratic momentum. And each cycle since 2016 has more or less been a repudiation of the man, a turn away from him and many of his chosen acolytes. His own staff of the past doesn’t support him. He’s a felon. He’s suffering some manner of cognitive decline, where a brain that was once made of pudding is now made of old pudding, pudding that gets that gross chitinous skin on top of it, pudding that starts to leak its own brown deliquescence out onto the countertop. He’s old. He’s hateful. He brings little joy and mostly — well, it’s not even anger, it’s not even wrath, not precisely. It’s grievances. A thousand petty grievances, leaking from his pores, from his pale lips, from his puckered butthole eyes. Denethor with the tomato. As for her — a campaign that was relegated to feeling like two old sacks of white guy slugging it out turned into a thing of hope and delight and potential, even if that potential is complicated by the crass realities of politics. She’s got energy. She’s got momentum. She’s got bigger fucking rallies, and if the size matters, then she’s got size on lock.

Were you to dangle me over a pit of crocodiles and demand I pick who I thought would win this horrible contest on Tuesday, a contest between a savvy, capable woman and a bigoted inside-out Halloween mask, I’d say I think she’s going to win. Not just because I want her to. But because that’s just how it looks from here.

But looks can be deceiving.

And he can very much win.

He can win because we may not clearly see the deeply sunken groundswell of hate that refuses to report on itself, that will soon burst forth like an infection. He can win if there are enough aggrieved young men, mostly white, but not all, each taught that things aren’t working out for them because They, with the conspiratorial capital T, are viciously working against them from the shadows, from the borders, from the gender-neutral bathrooms. He can win because, simply put, there are horrible people who like him, who like that he’s horrible. He can win because some of them have been hiding in plain sight. Look no further than that neighbor who you liked very much, who you thought was normal, who one morning went out and stuck one of his fucking signs on their lawn. He can win because logic and honesty do not always win the day. He can win with racism and sexism. He can win because we live in the upside-down and chaos definitely reigns.

And I think it’s important to realize that if he wins, which he can —

We are pretty fucked.

I do not want to be a huge bummer — after all, it’s Wednesday, it’s Hump Day, we’re over the hump, we do some humping, whatever, I dunno what it even means — but we are very seriously in super-fucked territory if he wins.

Which he can.

I am tired, of course, of existential elections — and sure, all elections, big and small, are important in ways that are obvious and in ways that are not, but very few of them feel quite like an apocalyptic hinge. Where if the door swings one way, we all get to leave and go out and play in the sun — but if it swings the other way, the lock clicks and we’re trapped in a house on fire.

If he wins, climate change — already at a tipping point — falls off the agenda, and shit definitely tips in the other direction, probably for good.

If he wins, bigotry wins, too — our trans friends are in trouble, our migrant friends are in trouble, women are in trouble. They’re already targets in this life, but now the bullseyes get a whole lot bigger. They’ll suffer.

If he wins, abortion rights are gone, gone, gone. Women will die in numbers far greater than they do now. IVF, also gone. Birth control, gone. Not right away. But the front sights are set. They’re targets. We’re targets.

If he wins, Elon Musk will be in charge of the economy, which is like — well, how do you quantify that with a metaphor? He’s already the best worst example. He bought Twitter, fucked its rock-solid branding, then drove it off a cliff into a swamp. The Cybertruck is easily the most embarrassing American product released, and that’s in a country where we have Shake Weights and hats that say FBI FEDERAL BOOB INSPECTOR. Musk wants to cut all “non-essential” spending, which is to say, he wants to set fire to the American economy, either because he’s a skipping dipshit or because he knows if he crashes the car they can sell the scrap metal to Russia.

If he wins, RFK Jr. will be in charge of health policy, which is like — well, it’s like if you let Elon Musk run the economy. They want vaccine mandates in schools gone. Vaccines. Vaccines. Easily one of the most crucial victories for civilization, they want to kick to the curb. We’ll all be licking roadkill and sharing brainworms. Elon Musk’s mind-chips will have a little glass terrarium for RFK Jr.’s brainworms. A match made in hell.

If he wins, democracy is skewered. That’s not my promise. It’s his. And he has a Supreme Court who has confirmed that he has a truly alarming freedom from consequences. Worse, he’ll get to pick more justices, potentially.

If he wins, it’ll be another four years — and maybe more — where we wake up every day, every fucking day, and the moment we glance at the news we know we’re going to be inundated with some new stupid shitty thing he said or did or both, some racist shit, some sexist shit, some ignorant shit, one more thing broken and left on the floor in shards. Guardrails kicked over, systems dismantled, safety nets sliced into ribbons. Every day, every goddamn day we’ll have to joylessly wake up and bear witness to the great dismantling.

If he wins, Russia wins. Ukraine is in deep. And Netanyahu wins, too, and Palestine ends up as beachfront property, with blood soaking the sand.

If he wins, billionaires and corporations get more rights than we do, and our already-termite-chewed regulatory state will collapse into sawdust. Lead in our toys, listeria in our food, planes breaking in half, every car an 8-bit dumpster. What brittle trust we have now, stepped on like a cookie, turned into a scattering of crumbs.

If he wins, the next pandemic — bird flu, if I had to put money on it, though in this hell-age it’ll probably be aerosolized gonorrhea or a zombie plague– is gonna get us real good. It’ll be worse, somehow, than the last one. What, you think RFK, Jr. is going to fix it? We’ll all have to line up at our chiropractor to get our daily ivermectin shots as we cough and puke and boil.

If he wins, information will mean nothing. Misinformation and disinformation will be the best we get. A hurricane of bullshit.

If he wins, AI will be absolutely everywhere.

If he wins, truth will be absolutely nowhere.

If he wins, the rich get richer, and the rest get fucked.

If he wins…

It’ll all come crashing down.

All of it.

Everything. And though some may romanticize this as some essential breaking of a corrupt and corroded cycle, the romantasy of it dies under the pile of wreckage and the heaps of actual dead people.

And the thing is, what I’ve mentioned here, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Haven’t talked about education, or surveillance, or book bans, or holy fuck, how he has threatened to use the military on the “enemies from within,” enemies he has identified as being his political opponents.

It’ll be a nightmare, unfolding slow, then fast, where we get front row seats watching a dystopia form to carry us through an apocalypse.

But we have another way.

You gotta vote, and you gotta vote Harris / Walz. You gotta help others do the same. And I know, there are certainly policies you don’t agree with of hers, and here I encourage you to watch Bernie Sanders on that point. It’s good to have principles, but not when the execution of those principles serves only your moral comfort and not, say, the greater good. The perfect cannot be the enemy of that good. We choose the path that gets us collectively closer to a better place — not the path that will take us into only darkness.

If you’re like me, you’re currently gnawing yourself down to the nerve bundles. You know how when you have an appointment at 3PM, you have a hard time accomplishing anyfuckingthing until 3PM? The election is like that 3PM appointment for me. Mostly I’m just sitting here, staring forward, trying to accomplish something but mostly only rawdogging reality like it’s a bumpy overseas flight. But there are things you can do.

You can phonebank, knock on doors, and you can also call folks who have already voted to help cure problematic ballots. Talk to your friends, your relatives, talk to people online. Help them do what has to be done.

Let’s do this.

Let’s get it done.

Let’s never go back to him. Because if he wins —

Nah. Let’s just not let him win, okay? Right? Right.

LFG.