It’s not even noon but I’m starting to get an alarming twinge in my gut about the midterm elections. Not that i know anything about the early vote counts but I am beginning to catch a slight whiff in the air of acrid sweat, anticipatory anxiety, and primal fear. Even my old rescue black lab Harmony appears to smell something amiss when I took her out to pee. She kept sniffing and lifting her grey streaked snout skyward in various directions but especially towards certain key swing states and GOP gerrymandered voting districts here in Florida. These are places for the most part where “higher education” means college football, Fox news and maybe a Tucker Carlson PAC seminar on “Feminism and Falling Sperm Count”. Perhaps Harmony is just smelling a dead seagull or maybe it’s the latest Climate Change inspired Tropical Storm Nicole about to finish off whats left of South Florida’s already crippled coastline and crumbling infrastructure but I dont think so. In fact I wish that was all my trusty mutt and I were tag team spidey-sensing.
Honestly I fear I’m vibing Tolkien-esque Hobbit smoke signals on the far horizon. Call it intuition or delusional paranoia but I believe I may have picked up an almost imperceptible shudder in the ethereal astral plane, a seemingly subtle seismic shift but also quite possibly a dark foreboding and warning signal portending the self congratulatory return of the Evil One, Lord Sauron Trump to Middle Earth. Along with his Orc army of grotesque looking badly dressed MAGA supporters, flag-waving felons and hideous minions like Rudy Giuliani of “melting face fame” and Marjorie Taylor Greene who directly resembles an Orc homecoming drag queen I’m mostly afraid of the Bloated Orange Combover Man.
Even without the Dark Lord’s creepy disembodied flaming eye as an explicit movie spoiler and graphic image of doom there is a dawning disastrous sense within me about the midterm elections going on today as well as the down the line Final Fantasy winner-take-all Presidential election in 2024.
Maybe it’s just my never-ending frustration with the never properly working electronic gates, security system and entry door locks at my overpriced Sarasota apartment complex but this election cycle seems like a planned takeover by the Trump wing of the Republican Party, one that could have been avoided if Sleepy Joe would have woken up. It’s as if Old King Biden in his White House castle along with other Democratic leaders hobbled by family related problems, death threats, home invasions and baseless accusations of sex trafficking and baby cannibalism left the front door to winning the congressional elections unlocked, unguarded and ever so slightly ajar. Just like the Capitol police during the Jan 6 insurrection who were the US government’s premier security force … the quasi equivalent to the overhyped Iraqi Republican Guard, they too were wholly unprepared, undersupplied, understaffed, compromised and conflicted about their need to use deadly force to secure the Capitol Building. As a result they looked like amateur mall cops unable to turn away what was not only a serious national security threat but a riotous mob of unimaginable unruly weirdos, village idiots and Trump zombies wearing Buffalo horn helmets, etc.
So too these elections are occurring smack dab in the middle of an unprecedented time of craziness, crisis, uncertainty, chaos and political change characterized by extreme social and economic insecurity. In other words, nothing is really feeling “secure” at the moment including my Florida apartment complex’s security system and gates. Instead the Kingdom itself is heavily divided almost to the point it was when Abraham Lincoln warned “A house divided cannot stand”. Weakened, polarized and in continual crisis…distracted by economic and financial woes and a wily Coyote recurring plague virus that’s already dispatched a million Americans and compromised the physical and mental health of millions more. So yeah, the gates of individual and political sanity, human compassion, morality, mutual understanding and common civility were left open and a mutant horde of brain-dead zombies, election deniers and QAnon rabble rousers are now likely to breach the ramparts and gain control of the House of Representatives and many state and general elections. And THEN, even worse, they (the newly elected) might just do the absolutely unthinkable and release the Kracken, the MAGA monster and return the Mad King to his gold toilet bowl presidential throne… along with his assorted racist/violent antisemitic vengeance-seeking gun-toting fringe followers. Really hoping my nausea and this rambling reflection is nothing more than exaggerated paranoia or some leftover remnant of a flu bug or covid virus variant. However, sometimes its the little things like past behavior that count and turn out to be the best predictors of future outcomes including the kind of people who will end up running the show when the democratic dust settles so to speak. The complete absence of any publicly stated compassion, empathy or common respect shown by so many Republican party leaders and Congressmen in regards to Nancy Pelosi’s elderly husband getting his skull caved in by a clearly demented politically motivated intruder gives me a slight shiver and just the kind of dark foreshadowing feeling that makes me think of Jeff Goldblum’s classic line in Jurassic Park, “God I hate being right all the time”.