Political Theatre of the Absurd

I’m late getting to blogging and I haven’t gone shopping yet but I did get some work done today. I edited out a snippet of John Platt’s On Your Radar to post on Instagram and YouTube. I am still getting better at that. Instagram has a glitch when I post videos I can’t change the aspect ratio from square. What I discovered is that if I use the On Your Radar business account on Facebook I can post from my computer, not my phone. The problem with that is that I can’t then tag the video and have to go on the phone to do the tagging. I also prepared today’s Gord’s Gold for Mixcloud. I put together four episodes at once, the most recent and three older ones. I’ll eventually have them all archived there. You won’t always hear the same songs played on the Mixcloud as on Folk Music Notebook because I sometimes  have Ron picks the songs on the station. The idea is that he can replay the pieces with different songs. Please go to my Mixcloud and follow me and if you can afford to do so subscribe.

I never took anything out of the freezer for dinner yesterday, so I vamped, I had grilled cheese with ham and a baked potato. Here’s the sad part, that was great. It’s so tempting to do that every night. The one part of my diet that I’m not happy with is eating too much processed meat. I shouldn’t encourage myself to eat more. But it is so good. A just god would never allow that. The only reason I’m not going to hell is that it doesn’t exist. I try hard to be a good person, but I see nothing wrong with trolling god as he doesn’t exist either. Trolling God would be a good name for an atheist blog. I’m an atheist, and this is my blog, but this is not an atheist blog.

Four years ago, I explained to a small number of my friends that wanted members of the electoral college to be unfaithful and vote for Hillary, that it was undemocratic and would set a horrible precedent. I can now make the same point to the vastly more Republicans who wanted Pence to ignore the decide on his own which electoral ballots he should count. Would you be OK if in four years the Republican won the electoral college and Vice President Harris decided to not count some of the GOP ballots so the Democrat, perhaps Harris herself, would win? Is that how you think a functioning democracy works? It’s horrifying that a plurality of Republicans think it is. It is not just tyrannical it’s short-sighted, one day the worm turns, and you don’t want the opposition to do what you declared was kosher.

A point that I don’t see pointed out enough is that almost all the calls for ignoring the popular will and fixing the election for Trump come from people that don’t have the power to do so. House Republican can safely do so as they know that their votes won’t change anything. As it would take challenges in both houses to reject the ballots that meant it was safe for the Senators to vote to reject too as the Dem majority House wouldn’t. But that would bring us that much closer to the brink and very few Senate Republicans were willing to walk that close to the precipice. Pence, hardly the model for rectitude or fortitude, and totally loyal to Trump wouldn’t take the step that would make a difference, and Trump was outraged. The Republican governors, secretaries of state, and other GOP election officials all certified the votes for Biden in their states. It was only the ones that didn’t have the power to do anything about it that made legal challenges, ones that they knew would go nowhere. Trump didn’t know it; he seems to believe that things could have turned out otherwise. Those of us on the fearful left need to see it. What the GOP was dangerous and unscrupulous, but we were never in serious danger of the election being overturned. There was a leaderless insurrection, an insurrection with the support of the military is never going to go anywhere. It tears apart the populace, it makes the country far more difficult to govern, it cost the lives of five people, but it gave proof through the night that the flag was still there.

This is all political theatre; dangerous treasonous, political theatre. The danger comes from those that don’t recognize it as such, the ones that heard the playacting and thought it real. They are like the people that heard Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds and thought the Martians were invading. Instead, we have people, millions of people, who believe that America has been invaded by godless communists. Some of them believe it so deeply they are willing to take up arms. They are not an existential threat, but they are cancer in the body politic.

There’s been theatre on the part of the Democrats too. The 25^th Amendment has nothing to do with congress, there is no mention of the legislative branch at all until after the VP and cabinet invoke it. The resolution asking Pence to do so was just theatre. It served no legitimate governing purpose. You could argue the same for impeachment. If you think there is no chance that enough Republican senators will defect and vote for conviction, what is the point of impeachment? Trump was already impeached, did it hurt him? No. Did it cost the GOP seats in congress, no. The Republicans got a higher fraction of the vote in 2020 than they did in 2018. I would love for Trump to be convicted and I hold out hope that given enough rope that Trump will hang himself before the vote and Republicans will defect. But if you think that’s impossible then all impeachment would accomplish is use up time and energy that the Democrats need for passing legislation. So much needs to be passed quickly. We have to staunch the wounds that Trump has inflicted. I don’t even know where to start from health care, to women’s rights, to the environment, to international relations, to regulating businesses, to LGBT rights, Trump has been on a spree of vandalizing the country as he is forced out of office. I write this and get angry and want to impeach him. I hold out a sliver of hope that he can get convicted, it’s a narrow sliver. But we can’t let that take our focus off the things that need to be done.