sonora2sonoma

Douglas Adams was prescient when, in his splendid opus, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,’ he described how the Golgafrinchans rid their planet of its hairdressers and telephone sanitizers, sorts they regarded as dead weight, by duping them into believing their home world was in imminent danger of being devoured by a great mutant star goat and then shipping them off, having been misled into believing the others would follow, on an intergalactic ark in search of a new home in the stars.

That these folks eventually landed on a primordial earth and set about a chain of unfortunate events that, eons later, resulted in its being peopled with their kind today (yes, humans) goes a long way toward explaining how we are currently beset with a such sizeable number of folks who, despite all odds, still consider trump the best thing that’s come along since chocolate.

But I digress. The real message here is, if sanity prevails in the upcoming election and trump and his sycophants are defeated, these hopeful developments alone will not be sufficient to end our long national nightmare. We will still be left with those who will cling like barnacles to the perverse notion that their ‘war president’ received a raw deal. It is not likely that these people, of much greater concern to society than hairdressers and telephone sanitizers, will submit meekly to their unrealistic hopes and dreams having been dashed on the rocks of reality.

And it is those hopes and dreams, or more accurately, the injection of such irrational nonsense into the national discourse, and, most worrisome, its normalization, that will be the most difficult phenomena to counter in any efforts to steer the ship of state into calmer waters.

If only the technology existed to enable us to build such an ark as Adams envisioned, it should not prove all that difficult, given the tendency of trump’s followers and sympathizers to blindly accept the preposterous, to convince them of earth’s impending doom by some equally outlandish means. Then it would just be a matter of presenting a ride on a spaceship within their reach and selling it as not only their sole means of salvation but also as a special opportunity for each of them, personally, to be among the first participants in the Great trump Diaspora—a chance to forge ahead to create a great ‘trumpian utopia’ beyond the stars.

If only it were that simple!

Tim Konrad

2020.10.10