Reality and its tethers
Since we’ve been discussing the likely outcome of the 2016 election, which you are predicting will result in a Trump victory and I am predicting a Clinton victory, the November results will demonstrate whether your feet or mine were planted on more substantial ground. If the contest is close, which I do not rule out, your prediction will appear less droll than it does today, and if the short-fingered vulgarian prevails, I will make certain that one of the last things I do before mixing up and downing that Drano cocktail will be to post a handsome tribute here to your perspicacity.
Am I troubled “that Hillary will not allow the American People to know what she said to the bankster class behind closed doors?” Since you ask, not particularly. I assume that she tailored her remarks to her audience, and also that, with the honorarium check not yet transacted, she did not glower at the assembled arbitrageurs and snarl, “As for you filthy bloodsuckers, I’m going to have the tumbrels lined up three deep all along Wall Street come January, and then I’ll personally drive the first bulldozer that pushes your mutilated carcasses en masse into an EPA Superfund site.” I imagine she probably told them that it was a pity that that mean old socialist from Vermont was saying bad things about them, that it was greatly to be regretted that their contributions to American prosperity were not better understood and appreciated, that she trusted nevertheless that they would soldier nobly on, et cetera. Quelle surprise!
You seem to have fastened onto the idea that I and Another_Scott have clambered ardently aboard the Clinton bandwagon. I won’t presume to speak for Scott, but I my own support of HRC, while increasingly solid, has little enthusiasm to it. I could wish for better political chops and for more evidence of contemplated caution in the conduct of foreign affairs. I also hold her surname against her, a bit, because I think it unhealthy in a democracy that executive power should be passed back and forth between a couple of families over the course of a few decades (strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government), although this is but one symptom of a complex of maladies at present assailing us. It would be pleasant to have a better class of candidates to choose among, and to have a ruling class more far-seeing and less madly avaricious to underwrite the roster made available, and for that matter to have an electorate less desperate, depraved and ill-informed. And I want a goddamn pony while we're at it.
So I will vote for Mrs. Clinton, if she is the nominee, in November (or for Senator Sanders, if it be he; against any conceivable Republican nominee I would even vote for, say, Jim Webb were a deadlocked Philadelphia convention to nominate him, although in that event I would depart the polling place with every molar a shattered stump) because I recognize that the alternatives would be worse by far. Roy Edroso, he of the admirable alicublog, relates how, in advance of the 2008 election, an associate warned that Obama would inevitably disappoint him. “Disappointment,” he replied, “will be a welcome change after eight years of daily shame and horror.” Knowing as we know now how modest was the change as measured against the hope, would the voters who turned out for this president in 2008 have done better to cast their ballots for Ralph Nader, that selfless character capering again beneath the banner of the Greens that year, and so exonerating themselves from any complicity in stepped-up drone warfare, in expanded NSA surveillance, in the failure to close Guantanamo or to pass single-payer? And had these high principles tipped the results so that the team of Johnny Walnuts and Princess Dumbass of the North Woods had prevailed, wouldn’t that have, like, been a totally cool way to heighten the contradictions? Heck, I’ll bet we’d have had our workers’ soviets up and running years ago. We might even be ginning up the show trials by now.
No, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Get the perfect if you can, but settle for the good. If the good isn’t available, settle for the lousy if the other alternative is the lethal. That’s my approach to this year’s election, but it doesn’t make me a “shill” for Clinton. As you have observed, you live in benighted Indiana, which will almost certainly put its electoral votes in the service of a man with freakishly tiny hands late in the year (and with your help!), so you may take comfort in knowing in the likely event of a Clinton victory that your own hands, which I have no doubt are well within the range of normal adult male dimensions, will remain spotless and unsullied.
cordially,
Am I troubled “that Hillary will not allow the American People to know what she said to the bankster class behind closed doors?” Since you ask, not particularly. I assume that she tailored her remarks to her audience, and also that, with the honorarium check not yet transacted, she did not glower at the assembled arbitrageurs and snarl, “As for you filthy bloodsuckers, I’m going to have the tumbrels lined up three deep all along Wall Street come January, and then I’ll personally drive the first bulldozer that pushes your mutilated carcasses en masse into an EPA Superfund site.” I imagine she probably told them that it was a pity that that mean old socialist from Vermont was saying bad things about them, that it was greatly to be regretted that their contributions to American prosperity were not better understood and appreciated, that she trusted nevertheless that they would soldier nobly on, et cetera. Quelle surprise!
You seem to have fastened onto the idea that I and Another_Scott have clambered ardently aboard the Clinton bandwagon. I won’t presume to speak for Scott, but I my own support of HRC, while increasingly solid, has little enthusiasm to it. I could wish for better political chops and for more evidence of contemplated caution in the conduct of foreign affairs. I also hold her surname against her, a bit, because I think it unhealthy in a democracy that executive power should be passed back and forth between a couple of families over the course of a few decades (strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government), although this is but one symptom of a complex of maladies at present assailing us. It would be pleasant to have a better class of candidates to choose among, and to have a ruling class more far-seeing and less madly avaricious to underwrite the roster made available, and for that matter to have an electorate less desperate, depraved and ill-informed. And I want a goddamn pony while we're at it.
So I will vote for Mrs. Clinton, if she is the nominee, in November (or for Senator Sanders, if it be he; against any conceivable Republican nominee I would even vote for, say, Jim Webb were a deadlocked Philadelphia convention to nominate him, although in that event I would depart the polling place with every molar a shattered stump) because I recognize that the alternatives would be worse by far. Roy Edroso, he of the admirable alicublog, relates how, in advance of the 2008 election, an associate warned that Obama would inevitably disappoint him. “Disappointment,” he replied, “will be a welcome change after eight years of daily shame and horror.” Knowing as we know now how modest was the change as measured against the hope, would the voters who turned out for this president in 2008 have done better to cast their ballots for Ralph Nader, that selfless character capering again beneath the banner of the Greens that year, and so exonerating themselves from any complicity in stepped-up drone warfare, in expanded NSA surveillance, in the failure to close Guantanamo or to pass single-payer? And had these high principles tipped the results so that the team of Johnny Walnuts and Princess Dumbass of the North Woods had prevailed, wouldn’t that have, like, been a totally cool way to heighten the contradictions? Heck, I’ll bet we’d have had our workers’ soviets up and running years ago. We might even be ginning up the show trials by now.
No, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Get the perfect if you can, but settle for the good. If the good isn’t available, settle for the lousy if the other alternative is the lethal. That’s my approach to this year’s election, but it doesn’t make me a “shill” for Clinton. As you have observed, you live in benighted Indiana, which will almost certainly put its electoral votes in the service of a man with freakishly tiny hands late in the year (and with your help!), so you may take comfort in knowing in the likely event of a Clinton victory that your own hands, which I have no doubt are well within the range of normal adult male dimensions, will remain spotless and unsullied.
cordially,
