Saturday, November 07, 2020

Ding dong! The witch is dead! Probably.

            He’s likely mad as hell. But will he take it any more?

 

Let me put this political story in its weird personal context. Last Wednesday I suffered one of those medical misfortunes that affect geezerly cranks like me. I went for a routine visit to my doctor and ended up a trapped patient in a major New York hospital for two and a half days.

 

I was irate, of course. The entire thing was — as I declared so loudly and often that when I finally got to go home, the hospital gave me a booklet on where I could find psychological counseling —  a hash of medical over-reactions, defensive medicine carried to a preposterous extreme, and clerical errors — all of which resulted in an unnecessary endoscopy. 


The endoscopy revealed, as I loudly had been insisting, that I indeed did not have a bleeding stomach ulcer. Although now I have to take Prilosec for a while to deal with the stomach irritation that the endoscopy caused.

 

Political TV tedium

 

Meanwhile, I was confined for much of the time to a dreary hospital room where the television set gave me a choice of Doctor Phil, Ellen DeGeneres, a couple of tedious movies, and the news. 


So for three days, while I waited for Big Distinguished Hospital to do its unnecessary thing, I sat watching CNN and CNBC as they hashed, re-hashed, and re-re-hashed the tedious vote count in Pennsylvania, and the minutae of vote changes in Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona. And then rehashed it again. And again.

 

So imagine how pleasantly surprised I felt when I finally got home and turned on the TV to  find the news channels showing people dancing in the streets in Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles, and even Paris, inspired to this joyful behavior  by the news that Joe Biden is now the president-elect of the United States.

 

O, that it were absolutely true!

 

Murphy’s Law and The Terminator

 

The news about Joe Biden could be true. It’s probably true. But the results have to be certified. The Electoral College has to convene. Things have to go off flawlessly. The courts, in which Trump's lawyer will challenge the election, have to side with law and logic rather than Donald.


And given the massive size of this political operation, the time it takes, and the fact that Donald Trump reportedly rushed away from his golf game when he heard the news and roared back to the White House to call his lawyers, the machine that is Murphy’s Law may also be dancing in the streets.

 

And speaking of machines, was it The Terminator or Robocop that got blasted with explosives, singed and nearly melted by flames, lost its legs, and still kept going, propelling itself with its arms toward completing what its microchip perceived as its mission.

 

The Trump machine is like that. It ought to be dead. But just when you think it’s dead, it’s not dead. But then you’re sure it’s dead, but it’s not dead. But then it is subjected to forces no living thing can survive so you're absolutely, positively certain it’s dead, but it’s not dead. But then…

 

Whoever wrote that movie script must have understood the Trump mentality.

 

So I sing out — but prayerfully — that  the Witch Is Politically Dead. Ding dong! 

 

But I’m also keeping my fingers crossed.

 

Well, at the very least, the news ruined Trump’s golf game.

 

And now this. 



And also this:





No comments: