Bad Vibes

 

I woke up Wednesday morning in the same world I woke up in the day before. I wasn't sad, not disappointed or even depressed. I checked my pulse to see if I died or something and considered I might be dissociating or something, but that wasn't it, either. I had wanted to be optimistic and keep a positive face and try to believe that who and what Trump was and did mattered leading up to the election, but I didn't have to do that anymore, and honestly, that part was almost a relief.

He got the popular vote, you guys. This wasn't echoes of 2016 for me, this was echoes of 2004, when I was positive that people might realize the Bush was not a really great president in a lot of ways, and look past all that Swift Boat shit and just...

And then some farkakteh "security moms" who were really, really concerned about terrorism got him a second term. Or so the narrative went. But anyway, John Kerry was basically Jane Fonda and....

Whatever. 

Anyway, the thing that made me feel like Oh shit wasn't the election--it was an SNL skit featuring Tim Kaine. 

Damn. Brutally accurate. And then there was Moo Deng.

Wait! What? You are likely saying, Vixen, what the hell does a little baby pygmy hippo in Thailand know about US politics? 

Have you met the actual US voters? Because the media were literally showing them to us in small town diners all the time. There was a spike in searches for "Joe Biden dropped out?" at or around the day of the election. That's got to be up there with people in the UK searching "What is Brexit?" after the vote for me.

Can you explain to these voters things like "inflation was high, it was no one's fault, and it's much lower now" in any plausible way? The media wanted more policy from Kamala Harris, but people don't get policy. The media could have educated about that, but what they did was take polls showing THEM that the public didn't understand what was going on and decided that was a political problem not an information problem.

The Democratic confusion was also that white ladies and Gen Z were going to care about the Dobbs decision and their future and well. No. 

The same disappointing white ladies who rejected Hillary Clinton in 2016 raised the little pishers who voted this year. Or rather, checked out while online influencers turned their kids heads to mush. And it's not like we have a Walter Cronkite-like figure anymore whose reporting would let them know Trump is in fact--not cartoon-villain bad, but real-world bad. 

I can't get into the headspace of someone for whom Trump is not a clown and a creep. What I do know is, about three weeks ago, an older woman in a store told my husband she liked his "Harris" tee shirt, and while he voiced HIS pessimism (because he's been pretty sure Trump would be back, like Michael Meyers, Freddy Krueger, etc. because he wasn't properly taken down the first time), the boomer assured us "the good people would come out", and I looked off into the middle distance because I wasn't even sure what that army was supposed to look like. 

And in a different store, a cashier (about 20) wondered why were we were voting for Harris. Because Trump is everything that's bad? And he was certain all politicians are bad. (White collar fraud, sexual assault bad--all of them?) Only here twenty years on this earth and already nihilistic. 

So is it just vibes, just bad vibes, that could result in good, seasoned US Senators like Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown and Bob Casey to go down to actual phonies? (Look their opponents up--all kind of fugazi.)  Well, that and a cheap but effective campaign technique--the most disgusting and lying and negative tv and radio ads of all time. Played constantly-maddeningly. Like loud music playing during a siege operation as psyops. 

Now me, I heard them in my little Philadelphia environ being me, and being mad, and wanting a 90 minute documentary rebuttal of all the LIES! Not everyone is me. Regular folks are sick, they are exhausted, they don't know all this is lies and some of it feels true, and even if they were predisposed to vote at all for Harris- it turns them off of politics altogether.

They are suppressed. Boom. Same tactic as 2016 digital ops for GOP. 

The game needs to be changed. Charting out how is the fucking key. And we haven't got it yet. 

And I know some very online people are trying to tell themselves something happened to the turnout, something happened to 15 million or so Democratic votes. Shit--been here before. 2004. Bobby Kennedy was claiming the 2004 election was stolen, and Dems still hurt over the 2000 SCOTUS anointment of Shrub thought "Maybe."  

I am not interested in a "2024 truther" movement. I am already resigned to doing another four years of TrumpWorld Grab-Bags and don't want to go "Cope-a-Bananas" over a chimera. 

We just have to figure out a different way, and it won't look like how we did things before. The end.