A Blustery Day

Here in Savannah, the weather has finally turned cool and, dare I say, downright blustery. When people ask about living here, I generally tell them that it’s great – for about seven months a year. The other five are a bit of a challenge. I didn’t know heat and humidity until living through Savannah summers. This place be wuuuurm.

Yesterday was nice and cool, too, which may partially explain why over 300,000 people took advantage of Georgia’s first day of early voting. That more than doubles the previous record of 136,000, set in 2020. What do these numbers mean for Harris’s chances in Georgia? I have no idea.

I will say, though, that right after Kamala got into the race following Biden’s atrocious debate performance, I had occasion to go to the local DMV. While there, I noticed a number of people registering to vote, and the majority of those people were Black women. Would they have registered that day had Kamala not entered the race? Again, I have no idea. That’s one anecdotal data point, but it suggested to me at the time that there might be some reasons for encouragement as we race towards Election Day.

A blustery day.

I have no idea how this thing is going to pan out. Like everybody else, I’m just reading whatever tea leaves I can swirl about, attempting to discern some answers from the chaos. I have none. I just know that we’re at a national inflection point; if Trump wins, I worry that we’re going to enter a time of political madness and national uncertainty. That’s the best case scenario. If Harris wins, we’ll have a respite from Trump but I don’t think the MAGA movement goes away. What does it look like post Don Sr.? I don’t know. Will it still have legs if, say, Don Jr. takes over the helm? Or JD Vance? Or some other, less telegenic presence than the OG DJT? Only time will tell, but this burgeoning soft American fascism doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

The fact of the matter is, there’s a billionaire class primarily interested in dismantling the federal government. Why? I think there’s probably a number of reasons, including some that probably sound good in principle – reducing the government’s “power” always sounds good in principle. But when you get down to what that actually looks like, the bag becomes decidedly more mixed. What do you mean you want to eliminate federal funding for public schools? What do you mean you want to get rid of food inspectors? You want to privatize… everything? I mean, what does it look like when the oligarchic class, already ascendent, grabs even more power? It starts to look a little like Russia, nyet? And you wonder why Trump has such an affinity for the guy.

If one’s worldview is that life is divided by winners and losers, wouldn’t one naturally look to Moscow for the ultimate “winner”? Putin is said to be the world’s wealthiest man, his money “earned” through his kickbacks from the oligarchs he allows to run the nation’s economy, such as it is. In other words, Putin is a literal stakeholder in the Russian economy. He gets a piece of all of it. Do we know anybody else who might like that kind of gig?

One of the things I’ve learned in my short career as a political commentator is that I don’t know shit about shit. So I don’t know what a second Trump presidency will actually look like. I do know that it will be marred by the same incompetence, malfeasance, corruption, and embarrassment as the first. I also suspect that the crazy will be turned up to 11 as Trump finds himself unshackled by either his advisors or the law. What exactly does that look like? Again, I don’t know. But I have to believe it doesn’t look… what’s the word I’m looking for… good.

A buddy of mine is a professional vote canvasser (if that’s a job title, I’m not sure it is), and we’re going to go knock on some doors this afternoon. My son will be joining us. I’ve never gone canvassing before, and it’s not the kind of activity that comes naturally to me. Knocking on doors just seems so… intrusive. I don’t even know if it’s effective. But fuck it, we’ve all got to do something so I’m doing this. It’s what we call “doing the bare minimum.” At least the weather will be cool and, dare I say again, blustery!

My buddy, Mr. Blue, with whom I’ll be canvassing later today.

I’m just going to keep daring to say “blustery,” despite the fact that there’s nothing particularly daring about describing wind conditions, but at the same time, if a cold wind is going to blow, I’m going to describe it as blustery regardless of whether the description is accurate or not. Regardless of its meteorological precision, that cold wind is certainly blowing. In a few weeks, it’ll sweep away something,

Anyway, I’m grateful for the drop in temps. Grateful that so many people turned out in Georgia yesterday. Grateful to knock on some doors and try to persuade some more folks to turn out today and every day until November 5^th. With luck, I’ll be back to writing about UFOs on November 6^th.