Maddening

Two weeks from tomorrow is going to be a bad day. I don’t mean that I think Trump will win the election, although the possibility is a coin flip, but that the day itself is likely to feel interminable and that, by day’s end, it’s likely we’ll all force ourselves to go to bed without knowing who won the damned thing. The coverage will be breathless and annoying. Both sides will be breathless and annoying. I, too, will be breathless and annoying.

We’ll almost certainly see Trump declare victory at some point, a victory which may or may not be his to claim, but which will set the stage for whatever challenges, lies, lawsuits, and chicanery we’re likely to experience if it looks as though the election is not going his way.

From Harris, I expect continued decorum on Election Day, but she, too, is unlikely to concede even if it looks as if she’s on the losing end. She’ll probably encourage people to remain patient and calm as the votes are tabulated, at which point I’ll probably scream at the television, “YOU remain patient and calm!” She will be unable to hear me and neither of us will feel any better.

The coverage will begin at midnight Tuesday morning as the six registered voters in tiny Dixville Notch, New Hampshire complete their quadrennial ritual of becoming the first in the nation to cast their votes. Reporters will dutifully record their choices as if the sturdy Dixville Notchians are representative of anything other than the American obsession with attention whoredom.

For Election Night attire, I recommend wearing white.

From there, reporters in battleground states will speak to us from random polling stations in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. They’ll speak with voters, make a fuss over exit polls, and pretend to not have better information than they’re presenting to the public. That will continue until polls start to close, at which point they’ll immediately declare all the states that can be immediately declared. And then the Magic Screens will come out.

All the networks will have some version of their blippity-bloopity election maps, which will be able to track votes in real-time and compare those totals with previous elections, down to the county level. The John Kings and Steve Kornackis of the nation will practice their mathematical mumbo jumbo as they peer into their digital crystal balls to divine the very near future, a future which, as I said will be close at hand but most likely still unknowable Tuesday night.

As for me, I will almost certainly watch nearly every second of the coverage and hate myself for doing so. It’s also likely that we will move up our normal Friday night pizza ritual to Tuesday. How will possibly be expected to cook when Bucks County, PA is about to release their first tranche of votes? My mood will rise and fall with every utterance from every analyst, and I will, at some point, almost certainly take an Ambien to erase myself from the evening.

Wednesday morning will arrive. With it, we will either know who won the race or we will not. I don’t know how the parties managed to make it this close, but it seems as though the contest is a dead heat, with the New York Times reporting this morning that neither candidate has any meaningful advantage in the handful of states that will determine the outcome.

For those asking, “How is this thing so close?” I can offer only this answer: I have no idea. But that’s because I am on the side of reality, a position which appears to be increasingly untenable. For those on the other side, reality is fungible. I’m not sure they’re wrong to believe it to be the case; they’ve managed to convince approximately half of the voting population that facts are a liberal conspiracy. Who’s to say they’re wrong?

After all, if Trump retakes the office of the presidency, they will be able to legislate their reality into being. It will be a reality in which taxes are always in need of cutting, the climate is just fine, transpeople are a bigger threat than another pandemic, and immigrants must be rounded up and sent to concentration to preserve our nation’s Black jobs. Their reality will become ours, whether we like it or not. Prediction: we will not like it.

In the meantime, I’m trying not to get too high or low about the current state of the race. The fact is, I have no idea who will win. I suspect even the campaigns don’t have a great idea. They’re internal numbers are likely telling them the same thing public polls are telling the rest of us: it’s close. Somehow, the political parties have achieved a kind of game theory optimal condition in which the two sides are in an uneasy equilibrium. The tiniest thing may swing the election one way or the other: bad weather in Michigan, maybe. Or a miscue at a rally in Arizona.

Who knows?

What I do know is that, by the time the outcome is known, at least a couple billion dollars will have been spent to turn out, or swing, a few tens of thousands of votes. This election, like all recent American presidential elections, will be decided by the people least knowledgable about anything. I wouldn’t trust most of these people to pet sit, but I’m supposed to be cool with entrusting the nation to their whims? Maddening.

But that’s where we are. And, unfortunately, that’s who we are. A nation with no clear sense of where we are headed, or why. We’re torn between our history as the indispensable nation and our competing desire to go off grid. “America First” can also be read as “Leave Us the Fuck Alone.” Part of me – a very small part - shares the sentiment, although even an idiot like me knows that the world will keep churning regardless of America’s engagement with it; unfortunately, when we remove ourself from the world, bad things tend to happen. Our internal politics will remain fractured and tumultuous regardless of who wins. I obviously believe a Harris administration gets us closer to securing the good in our country, but I have no illusions about any single president’s ability to “heal the nation.”

I don’t know how we escape our current national morass. The only thing I do know is that two weeks from tomorrow is the next pivot point in the American story. We recognize the import of this election because everybody can sense that we’re poised to go in two distinct directions. One will keep us engaged with the world and with tackling the nation’s actual problems. The other will disengage us from our alliances and will focus instead on serving the narrow interests of an aggrieved white populace hellbent on taking the nation back to the 1850’s.

Truly, deeply maddening.