Fickle, thy name is American voters. A month ago, Biden was mired at a miserable 41% popularity rating, and Trump was riding pretty. Today, with Biden out of the race, and fueled by a sense of nostalgia and gratitude, Biden is at his highest rating, 46%. If voters had appreciated Biden that much a month ago, Harris wouldn’t be running.
Let’s all hop into the Wayback Machine for a moment. I promise it’s relevant. Now imagine we’re back in your childhood, you’re 8 years old, and it’s Christmas morning. You’re sitting next to a tree stuffed with presents underneath. The first gift was from Aunt Gloria, socks, underwear and t-shirts. SHOOT! The next was from your grandma, new winter boots. CRAP! A double scoop, please. But the third present was the pair of hockey skates you had been including in your bedtime prayers since October, and the fourth present was a new pair of hockey gloves. Suddenly you felt like Zeus on crack, with a poerfect March Madness pool ticket in your pocket!
Now we’ll travel back to today, and look at the political landscape for the last eight years. For the last eight years, Donald Trump has been surprisingly focused and on message, We are beset all around by American Carnage! The country looks like the Australian landscape from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and the Southern Invasion is so bad that even black people can’t get the jobs that white people don’t want anymore. And if Trump doesn’t win, it’s only going to get worse!
According to Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump was A selfish, unqualified, misogynist, sexist pig on two cloven hooves, and his supporters were a basket of deplorables! In 2020, Biden threatened that we were In a battle for the soul of America!, and in 2024, up until a month ago, If you let Trump back in the White House, you won’t have a democracy anymore in four years! Sh*t! I have an electric stove! I can’t even blow out the pilot and stick my head in the oven!
And then along comes Kamala Harris. The Joyful Warrior. And you know what? She actually stands there and laughs, a rich, full bodied laugh that comes from the toes, and just at the perfect moment. And she actually smiles while she talks about how great this country is, and all the ways it could be even greater!
And she brings along with her a guy who looks like your high school football coach, and that’s because he was a high school football coach. And when they talk about how This is hard work, but we like hard work! The way we do it, hard work is fun! And all you can think about is those drills on the practice field, and how good it felt to finally get all of that brush cleared out of the yard. And suddenly yoiu don’t want the oven anymore, what you want is your lawn chair and a six pack. And when she yells, Are we ready to fight for it?! You’re running to the garage to grab your gas weed whacker and line up in formation.
And in the course of a month, that’s what this election has become. Whether it was Trump, Clinton or Biden, the vision of America was something like the dark cloud that constantly hung over LA in Blade Runner, constantly dropping a soaking rain. No matter who you voted for, you couldn’t stop the rain, you could only keep it from getting worse.
Trump has made no move to change his apocalyptic rhetoric, nor does he want to. That’s the kind of sick sh*t his slobbering mob gets off on. It makes them feel like Mad Max. But when Harris and Walz stand there, with those open, honest smiles, just so f*cking happy to be there, you can literally see the clouds breaking up, and when they tell you that next spring is going to be like nothing you’ve ever seen before, you believe it.
Because the simple fact is that joy is one of the most powerful motivators there is. But leaders use the joy of their vision of a perfect life and afterlife to suck desperate people in. In poor Muslim countries, it is religious joy that makes a hardscrabble existence not just bearable, but satisfying.
This is something that I’ve felt for a long time, and you’re hearing it here first. I strongly believe that all despotic and authoritarian governments carry the seeds of their own self destruction in their own DNA.
You can only suppress the people for so long. You can only beat and terrorize the people for so long. You can only starve and imprison them for so long. But when the night is at its darkest, and that light at the end of the tunnel is the 5:12 to Murmansk, a funny thing happens.
Hope and Joy somehow or other spring up. Somewhere, somehow, the people find an individual or a cause that holds out the almost heavenly prospect of a better future. And when your daily, everyday life is already in the sh*tter, to quote Traitor Tot, What the hell do you have to lose?
- The Berlin Wall came down without a shot
- Lech Walesa and his Solidarity union brought down the Soviet backed Polish government without a shot
- Corazon Aquino, the wife of martyred Filipino activist Nino
Aquino sent dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe crazy wife Imelda into asylum in Florida without firing a shot. In fact, during the height of the peaceful protests, Philippine soldiers left their weapons in their barracks, and walked out into the streets to join the protests - Last year the Poles bounced out an increasingly autocratic government without firiing a shot
As scientist Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, Life finds a way. It doesn’t matter what you put in front of it, or how you try to control it, life finds a way. And so does hope and joy. And that’s what the Harris-Walz campaign is offereing. They are offering a positive, hopeful vision of the future, and all they’re asking is that the people present put some skin in the game if they want to make it a reality. And that prospect is what people have been waiting eight long years to be offered. Enough confession every Saturday, how about a trip to the amusement park?
Trump can’t win in this environment, and neither can the GOP. His only vision of America is dark and apocalyptic. Just so long as Harris and Walz don’t promise more than they can realistically expect to deliver, they’re in the drivers seat. The message is new and fresh and optimistic. 88 days to go.
I thank you for the privilege of your time.
Amen.
We’re all so tired of the relentless negative.
The joyous positive is soooo much better.
Excellent article, and timely as well. There is indeed a groundswell of joy growing across America and it has the powerful taste of freedom about it. Given even a tiny taste of that magic drug and even the most oppressed of people will stir, stand up and fight.