sonora2sonoma

While holed up huddled in abject terror over what next Tuesday might bring—either a return to sanity, a revolution of enlightened reasoning, OR a devolution into deeper delusions, mania and abject despair, I’m made mindful of the burden my generation is leaving, election aside, for Generation Y to cope with—the generation to which my grandkids belong. I feel compelled to apologize to them, to tell them how sad I am that they will inherit such a muddled mess of worries from my shortsightedly self-indulgent and massively misguided generation! I want to assure them that I was never idiotic enough to vote for any of it, except for once, when I was so young, uninformed and hoodwinked I shouldn’t have even been allowed to cast a ballot. Thankfully, I never made that mistake again!

Our country’s public-health-alert-of-a-president has taken my generation’s ill-conceived failings to the nth degree, growing them to monstrous proportions as befits his equally abominable proclivities. A product of the forces that stewarded such unrestrained hedonism and brought it to fermenting fruition, he is the personification of all that is rotten with today’s Republican Party.

As Michelle Goldberg observes in yesterday’s New York Times, “All the attention sucked up by this black hole of a president has been its own sort of loss. Every moment spent thinking about trump is a moment that could have been spent contemplating, creating or appreciating something else. But a perpetual state of emergency isn’t healthy or sustainable,” she adds, and makes it difficult to “conceive a future in which trumpism is unthinkable.”  

Goldberg continues, “trump has blocked out the sun. Only when he’s gone will we see how much we’ve been missing.”

Right now, I can’t even imagine a world without donnie covidseed spreading his misery around like pamphlets at a Jehovah’s Witness convention. What will the news media have to write about, I wonder, if he gets flushed down the toilet of history? If sanity prevails next Tuesday, about whom will I have to express my outrage and existential angst?

Actually, I figure this dilemma, daunting though it might appear, will in all likelihood take me at most, roughly 0.0008645666 microseconds to work out and then I’ll be “over it,” home free and ready to spend my time on immensely more important, productive, and satisfying pursuits like polishing the silverware, conducting search-and-destroy missions against the dust-bunnies in my study and varnishing some gourds I grew in my garden last year.

More broadly speaking, whatever happens with the election, I look forward to the day when we can all join together again without fear of contracting the ‘trump virus,’ so named because, after all the prolonged and mind-numbing idiocy of dumpf’s mishandling of the pandemic, that sonofabitch owns this thing!

Choose Life! Vote Biden-Harris 2020!

Tim Konrad

October 31, 2020