politics – Samuel Cohen

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

So they’re destroying higher education in the US. It was maybe the thing we should have been proudest of. For decades after the Baby Boom filled campuses to bursting and the National Defense Education Act of 1958 responded to Sputnik by pouring billions of dollars into research, American universities were the envy of the world. They were envied for the research they produced and for the mass provision of a quality post-secondary education. US higher education was the engine of local and state economies, returning many times on investment, and it made the much-touted American dream at least plausible for generations of students.

Aside from demographic explosions and geopolitical anxiety, another thing that made this system possible was shared governance. No, really. When a few American college presidents caught the German research university bug and the professoriate professionalized along with the other nascent professions, the deal was that the disciplines would determine for each what counted as scholarship and who counted as a scholar and how best the material should be taught. And together, the faculty across these disciplines would be in charge of who got hired and promoted and what got taught on their campuses. They would share in the governance of their campus. This is where the freedom students and scholars have to learn and research and teach, academic freedom, comes from. Just as there had always been, university administrations would be in charge of the money, prostrate themselves at the stone steps to the state house, man their boards with the rich, but the idea was that those parties could not have influence beyond the board room. Of course, that ideal was tested and often forgotten in times of high national stress; as soon as the AAUP was founded to protect the line between the classroom and lab on one hand and the board and the state on the other, it found itself bowing under the pressure of Great War jingoism. Likewise during McCarthyism. But the ideal of that line, on the whole, even during the late 20th/early 21st century battles of the Culture Wars, survived.

Thank god that’s over.

And we have the super-rich to thank for it, the multibillionaires, rich people the likes of which we’ve never seen (to borrow a phrase from Trump that is creeping into the vocabulary of regular people in a way that gives me nausea the likes of which I have never felt except maybe before I learned I have a cod allergy). They are able to wield influence on universities in a way their forebears could not do from the golf course or the boardroom, and they have brought that influence to bear in a way that obliterates that line between campus and outside influence.

As CEO investor multibillionaire Marc Rowan, who drove Penn’s president from office, is quoted as saying in today’s New York Times, the problem is shared governance:

Universities can’t fix themselves, Rowan says, because they’re burdened with ancient and outmoded structures of authority–universities come from medieval guilds, for god’s sake, guilds not even of faculty but of students, as Rowan surely does not know–structures that keep them from responding to the times the way he thinks they should. So he must bring his influence to bear to make sure they respond correctly.

What’s to blame for this increased influence? On the list, put the legislative and policy victories of the old kind of rich people, victories that made the new kind of super rich people possible; the Citizens United decision (for which I will never forgive the ACLU), for making those victories possible; the unprecedented occupation of seats in the Capitol by the wealthy; the occupation of the chair behind the Resolute Desk by a billionaire as crooked as they come. The list goes on.

The results? The resignations of university presidents under fire for not sufficiently condemning Gaza protests or not eradicating “DEI” from their campuses ruthlessly enough are the showiest results, but the much more widespread chilling effect is that felt at universities that aren’t Harvard or Penn or NYU, public universities where administrations are bending over backward to comply in advance of legal requirements and in obeisance to executive orders not worth the magic marker ink they’re signed with. The “Compact” the Trump administration tried to get the presidents of nine top universities to sign was a failure only in the absence of compliant signatories. The message was heard loud and clear. The administrations of public and private colleges and universities, leaders of a whole range of institutions, rushed to comply in advance, to anticipatorily obey, and to do so in ways that violated shared governance. Faculty have been fired. Centers doing diversity work have been shuttered. Websites have even been scrubbed of offending words.

None of this would be possible if these schools were following their own bylaws and the long-established principles of American higher education. So put these administrations on the list too. And put many of the faculty on the list too, for not standing up tall enough, not yelling loudly enough, not risking our necks to oppose these violations of faculty governance and basic decency. Not because we would have been defending ourselves. Because we would have been defending higher education.

Add to this the Trump administration’s attacks on foreign students, cheered on by the self-appointed billionaire champions of [checks notes] whiteness, patriarchy, and Benjamin Netanyahu, and even more significant, the administration’s illegal refusal to release research funds due to institutions, and you’ve got a recipe for great, maybe irreversible damage to American higher education. Who would want to come study here? Who will write the biting campus satire of the future, possible only because of the greatness of the idea and the institutions? You can’t be disappointed in something if it’s not worth believing in.

So we’ve sold our campuses to the highest bidders. We’re letting something of the greatest value be diminished, something all of us should be fighting harder for–not just faculty, not just alumni, not just anyone who lives in a college town or a state where the university system is one of the biggest employers or in a country where innovation comes from university labs and seminar rooms energized by students who came here to get an education. Once the billionaires have finally taken over our schools, and our country, maybe it will be a blessing that there will be nobody around with the time and resources to write the history of how we lost everything.

Hey You Assholes

An ICE agent points a crowd control weapon at a protester Tuesday in Chicago.
Photo Credit: Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

I haven’t written a thing on this blog since June because I’ve been busy and because I’ve been angry. Like maybe most of the people reading this, should such a thing happen, I’ve been moving back and forth between helpless angry and motivated angry, between there’s nothing we can do angry and we have to do something angry, between what on earth is there to say angry and there is too much to say to ever get it all said angry.

One good thing about all the things that are making me angry–the destruction of our institutions, the troops in the streets, the attacks on education, the attacks on immigrants, the attacks on journalism and health care and science–is that there are identifiable people to be angry at. I can’t prove that this is more the case than it has been in the past, but it feels that way, maybe because there’s so much showboating, personalizing, and video and audio and text from and about the people doing these things. What’s good about it, for my mental health, debatably and ask me again tomorrow, is that I can be angry at these specific people, these people who are doing these bad things everybody knows or should know are bad. It’s invigorating, the focus. They want to take responsibility for the illegal mass firings and the illegal defundings and the illegal kidnappings and the illegal tear-gassing? Okay, but then they get to take the anger too.

I’ve stolen the title for this post from one of my favorite recent books, a short fiction collection by a former student named Kyle Seibel that I can’t recommend highly enough because it’s dark and it’s edgy in the good way and it loves words and it’s got forty thousand pounds of heart. I hope he doesn’t mind my borrowing it.

Hey you assholes, if it’s somehow not clear, is what I want to say to the people I’m angry at for all the bad things they’re doing to my country. I’ve been trying hard not to say it so much in public lately because it’s becoming increasingly clear that respect for the First Amendment, academic freedom, the patriotism of protest, &c., is not at an all-time high. The identification of assholes and the naming of the bad things they are doing is not within my field of expertise, it could be argued, and so therefore maybe I will not be seen as protected by the traditional and hard-won protections of academic freedom for such acts of identification and naming. Nonetheless, I am angry at these assholes. We should all be angry at these assholes and we should say it and not stop there. We should get these assholes fired, voted out, and, if appropriate in individual cases, jailed for a long time. At the very least they should be shunned, hard. The men playing GI Joe in the picture up there but with real guns? The people who work hard all day to turn us against each other, to make some of us see others as enemies within? Shunned within an inch of their lives.

One of the things I’ve been busy with in addition to all the everything–all the teaching of books and editing of books and writing and reading of things and administrating and all that–is talking in public about one of the things I’m angry about, which is the attempts by certain people to get books they don’t like out of libraries and classrooms. I have traveled far and wide, if by far and wide you mean to coastal Maine, northwestern Wisconsin, to the local public library in my neighborhood, and to my university’s library across the street from my office, in order to talk about this subject. Why book banning? Because it’s got everything–astroturfing, culture wars, white Christian nationalism, anti-intellectualism, intolerance. Because it runs counter to everything good about our experiment in democracy; because it embodies everything bad about post-Tea Party America’s hostility to that experiment. Is it less urgent than the disappearing of our neighbors, which has even reached to my little town? In one sense, certainly; in another, maybe not: if these concerted efforts to get books recognizing and exploring difference disappeared from our children’s schools and our public libraries are successful, even fewer of us will have encountered difference and even fewer of us will stand up against efforts to eradicate it, deport it, erase it. Are the attempts to blackmail our universities to stop teaching about difference and uncomfortable parts of our history, the attempts to send foreign students home for bad reasons and no reasons, less urgent than the soldiers tear gassing our own streets? Again, in one sense, certainly; in another, not at all: if our universities turn away from the world and from the difference within our own country, what will we have left worth saving?

I’m swinging, as I write this, from too much to say angry back to what is there to be said angry. Writing this has done nothing to make me feel better about what’s happening all around us as the leaves start to fall, the football games get played, the lives go on, but maybe that’s not much of a goal. We shouldn’t feel better. We should open our front doors and step out onto on our stoops, climb out on our fire escapes, stand in the middle of the street and say Hey you assholes. Hey you assholes, what you’re doing is bad and we’re going to get your asses shunned but good. Then of course we have to call all the representatives, sign all the petitions, run for all the school boards, canvas all the doors, write all the letters and op-eds and funny heartfelt and -breaking signs, walk together in big crowds, saying Hey you assholes all the livelong day. Sound your barbaric yawp, to quote a guy whose book got banned 150ish years ago in Boston and then sold like hotcakes in Philly because it turns out people don’t want to have books kept from them and don’t find obscenity where there’s only joyous celebration of difference. They don’t.

Hey you assholes: we don’t want this.

Gulf of America

With help from Merriam-Webster:

gulf

noun

1. A part of the ocean or sea extending into the land

The U.S. has a few gulfs, among them the Gulf of Alaska, the Gulf of Maine, and the Gulf of Mexico. California has a couple more gulfs. The country’s also got plenty of sounds and bays and inlets (and even ten fjords), but only a few gulfs. If you look them up in a reference book (if you’re old and like books) or a reputable website, you’ll find pictures like the one above.

However, if you look them up on Google Maps, a formerly reputable website, you will find that the Gulf of Mexico has a different name. The Goniff in Chief* had a big idea, and he was so excited about this Big Idea that he made a proclamation, like a little King. And he decided there should be a day dedicated to his Big Idea.

Why did Google go along with this? According to the BBC, “Google said it was making the change as part of ‘a longstanding practice’ of following name changes when updated by official government sources.” A cynic might suggest that the real answer lies in the tech CEO tableau below, taken at the inauguration.

Since the Gulf is just a big giant stretch of water and has no government to object, apparently our President, if that’s what you want to call him and who am I to stop you, can just call it whatever he wants and that somehow has the force of law, or enough force to bring a Master of the Tech Universe (shout out to Tom Wolfe) to heel. Greenland, on the other hand, has, unfortunately from only this one point of view, a government and even people living there, so if we want it renamed, we have to buy it. But how? As of yesterday, there’s a bill for that:

Thanks, Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-GA). What do you get an authoritarian with the mind of a child who’s already got everything? Asked and answered.

2. A deep chasm: ABYSS

This hemispheric mislabeling/conquest misheggos is only one small part of the abyss that is opening up before us as a result of the country’s losing its misinformed, social media-misshapen mind and electing the GIC. Impending financial crash? Check. Full-blown constitutional crisis? Check. Crippling of scientific research, social services, and higher education? Check. Explicit bigotry enshrined in a flurry of deadly policies? Check. Loss of faith in our national project, always fallen short of but never just thrown out and lit on fire? Check. Will we fall into this abyss, this chasm, this Gulf of America, where we rename things because we want to Own Everything and Don’t Care About Other People? Can we stop it now? When the Vice President says judges can’t tell members of the executive or legislative branch what to do or more importantly what not to do, what is there to do?

3. WHIRLPOOL

Odysseus, just trying to get home to see his faithful dog, had to sail between Scylla and Charybdis, the man-eating monster and the ship-swallowing whirlpool. The rotating waters of the Strait of Messina, off Sicily, are only dangerous to small craft, a still-reputable website tells me, but that’s what experts think inspired the Charybdis of Greek mythology.

To be between Scylla and Charybdis, a saying still known by the kind of people who consult reference books, is to be between a rock and a hard place. I don’t know if that’s the right saying to capture where we are right now. What are our two impossible choices? Do we have any choices? Wouldn’t it be nice to have some?

4. A wide gap; the gulf between generations

The Gulf of America that bothers many of us the most about what’s happened in the last three weeks–it’s only been three weeks!– is the widening gaps being driven between already divided Americans. The greatest gap is one that’s not so much between the Haves and the Have Nots but between the Have Everythings and Everyone Else, a divide that “gap” and “abyss” and “chasm” don’t begin to capture. There’s the gaps between the right kind of Christian and everyone else, between white and Black, straight and not, right and left, American and foreigner, but all of these gaps, these gulfs, as significant as they are, aren’t just preexisting conditions worsened by people in power who don’t care. They are the gaps exploited by the Have Everythings so they can have more: more money, more power, more control to remake the country as they want it. They’re not just widening our gulfs; they’re using them, feeding off of them.

Renaming the Gulf of Mexico in itself is just silly. But it stands for the ascendancy of jingoistic bullying, of xenophobic hatred, of disregard and even disdain for following the rules that animates our current rulers. It’s what swept them into power and it’s what so many of your neighbors share with them, if you’re being honest. There’s your Gulf of America. You’re standing in it.

*goniff, as defined in Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish. Number 6 does not apply, as no proof of him loving fun is in evidence

1/6/2025

If you’re not the kind of person who watches C-SPAN, you might have missed this scene today: Bruce Fisher, the husband of brand-newly re-sworn-in U.S. senator Deb Fischer (R-NE), refusing to shake the hand of Vice President Kamala Harris. He offered a curt nod and returned her “thank you,” but could not manage the handshake. Just couldn’t do it, for reasons, none of which could possibly include misogyny or racism or anti-wokeism, which it hurts even to type, it’s so stupid.

I offer this:

Is it ungenerous to call this guy a piece of shit
— Sam Cohen (@samcohen.bsky.social) 2025-01-06T19:49:55.035Z

Do I regret my response? Do I really wonder if it is ungenerous? I do not and I do not. (Do I regret the absence of a question mark? I also do not. It’s a convention of online style, grandpa.) On the 6th of January, four years to the day that Deb and Bruce’s Grand Oligarchy Party stormed the building that they were standing in this morning, bent on derailing the certification of the election of the other party’s nominee, the spouse of a senator Was Going to Show Them.

Deb Fisher is not a new senator. She defeated Bob Kerry in 2012 to win her seat, won another six year term in 2018, and won a third in November. I don’t know what her husband did the other times she was sworn in. I do know that his family owns a very large ranching operation in Nebraska, large enough for the family’s children to own the majority of the stock in the family corporation, while Deb and Bruce, who moved to Nebraska five years ago, have held on to a minority share. I don’t want to judge people for owning a giant cattle ranch in Nebraska, where I am sure they are very nice to their employees, the environment, their neighbors, and the cows and I am sure their politics have nothing to do with any of that.

I also know that in 2021, Deb condemned what happened on January 6. In a statement, she said, “These rioters have no constitutional right to harm law enforcement and storm our Capitol. We are a nation of laws, not some banana republic. This must end now.” She also said that although she didn’t like the outcome of the election, fraud had not been proven, and she voted to certify the results. I also know that by May, she voted against the creation of an independent commission to investigate the riot, and that three years after the riot, she endorsed the man behind the riot. Did she ever vote to impeach that man? She did not.

Do I know how Deb feels about her husband’s little tantrum this morning? I do not. But she married him and had no visible reaction to what he did, or didn’t do, though I do imagine she will be answering questions about it for a few days.

I do know that Deb doesn’t like abortion, so much so that she’s all for a ban without exceptions. Things she’s not for? The ACA, restrictions on gun ownership, or the scientific consensus on climate change (through an aide, she has said it’s happening but it’s due to “natural cycles,” which, thanks for sharing your expertise, Dr. Fischer).

To what does this all add up? I don’t know. I do know that this senator, whose generally execrable positions are standard for today’s GOP, still on one occasion–the events of four years ago today–stood up to the con man to whom her party sold whatever tiny soul it had. For about five minutes. I also know that her husband stood in the building attacked by rioters sent in by that con man and refused to shake the hand of half of the ticket they were trying to deny the White House to. I know that people died and our democracy will never be the same. I know that, as reported today, the amount of ammunition confiscated on that day was enough to have shot every sitting member of the House and Senate five times each.

Rioter smashes Capitol window with police riot shield

Not shaking someone’s hand is the definition of petty. There’s a picture in the dictionary next to “petty” of someone not shaking someone else’s hand. I know it’s petty to not shake someone’s hand because I’m a petty person and have fantasized, repeatedly and lamely, about not shaking the hands of public figures I find awful, if given the chance. But to do it for real, today, there, at the scene of the crime? It’s still petty, but it’s also a reminder of something big–that the people who will be in charge in two weeks, the people who support them, the aggressive, sometimes violent movement of fake victims who shall not be tread upon unless it’s by the boot they choose, is big on ignoring the norms that hold democracies, however flawed and rigged and deeply undemocratic, together.

Do I think Harris should have called out Bruce Fischer? Delivered a sharp slap to his impressively pasty chops? I do not. She did what people do when they respect other people, occasions, norms. Do I think those of us who are not willing marks of the once and future con man in chief can afford to keep relying on norms and precedents and procedures and institutions and courts when the people we hope they’ll protect us from could manifestly give a shit about them?

I do not. On this fourth anniversary of the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2025, we should promise each other that we won’t comply in advance, that we won’t rely on norms, that we’ll fight Project 2025 and all the little local and state projects designed to support the GOP agenda in any way we have to. We can’t shake hands with the devil, the way any number of Democratic politicians seem eager to. There’s no working with a man like this man or with people who would help him do what he wants to do to us and for himself. Maybe Bruce Fischer has shown us something after all.

First lady of Poland skipping handshake opportunity

No Thank You

A liveblog poem

On this Thanksgiving day
In front of the Macy's Thanksgiving 
Day America Fuck Yeah Parade
I am here to say 
No thank you
I'm not feeling it
I don't want a tasting bite
I don't have the stomach for the lies today
I don't want Hoda and that other lady telling me 
as his balloon floats by
that Ronald McDonald will be stopping by local franchises 
to thank employees for their hard work
on Thanksgiving
I don't want Al Roker introducing the Peacock float
Extolling the virtues of its streaming content
As its electronic head swivels its electronic eye
Surveilling the crowd standing in the rain 
Telling them what to buy and watch and cheer for and be
No thank you, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Interpellation Parade
Not today
What am I most thankful for today, Al Roker?
I know you were asking Cynthia Erivo
But let's say you were asking me
And to your question I say
No thanks
But also thank you for reminding me of what you did
in the White House that one time
And also what the fuck are we doing
Yes we should we be in the streets
But we shouldn't be helping the corporations sell themselves
We should be saying no thank you in the streets
And we should be saying it to the asshole New York never liked
The asshole who wanted to be the richest man in Manhattan
The asshole who didn't pay his workmen or keep his promises
The asshole who just pulled the biggest con
Again
And to all the assholes eager to help him sell
himself, lies, and America, for parts
We should be in the streets saying No thank you
To the social media moguls flying their private jets to Mar a Lago
To the billionaires selling us 
Out
Instead, understandably, for now, we're home
Being thankful for each other
Being scared for each other
and of each other 
Being angry
Watching this stupid fucking parade
Tomorrow let's say no thank you
No thank you to the Robber Baron in Chief 
who never really even baroned but just went straight to the robbing
No thank you to this parade liveblog poem even
And sorry for the cursing

FUBAR

It’s been eleven hours and three days since the AP called the Presidential election in favor of the man who held the office during the worst presidency we’ve ever had. Nothing compares 2 him, of course, but I think it’s safe to say the 2024 version of Trump will supplant the 2016-2020/early 2021 version. Many of us think this is a bad thing. However, in spite of what is to some of us a confusing set of numbers, it is clear that our next, sure to be even worse president seems to have gotten significantly more votes than his opponent, and he’s gotten them from people who one assumes do not think this is a bad thing. Which raises questions, such as Why do they not think it is a bad thing? and What is wrong with this country? and What the fuck?

I don’t know how to answer those questions (especially the last one, which isn’t really a question). But I do want to talk about the title of this post, which I swear has something to do with all of this: I went to a high school headed by a man whose (I hope but seriously doubt secret) nickname among the students was FUBAR. Not coming from a military family, this was how I learned what the old Army-originating term FUBAR meant or, more accurately, what some people meant by it. At that school in central New Jersey (you’re damn right it’s real, @njgov), we thought it meant Fucked Up Beyond All Repair.

I have learned at some point in the intervening almost forty years that some people think it means Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. Merriam-Webster has it as Recognition. The Oxford English Dictionary also has it as Recognition (and includes the sanitized “Fouled” that even I, who do not come from a military family, know is a coverup).

The OED also tells us that the first recorded use of FUBAR in print was in 1944 in Yank, a weekly magazine produced for US soldiers during WWII. Yank was the idea of a man named Egbert White, who had worked for Stars and Stripes in the war before WWII, which nobody then knew to call World War I, so they just said it was a great war. The great war. Apparently the inclusion of a pin-up photograph was a big draw for the magazine, whose name, again, was Yank. White himself got yanked from the leadership of the paper over certain editorial decisions; you can read about it in his essay, “A Free Press in a Citizen’s Army,” which for some reason appeared in the Journal of Educational Sociology.

I never saw any evidence of FUBAR’s being actually fucked up, beyond repair or recognition. He was a genial and to me distant presence. He came to a track meet once and watched my race and had a chat with my mom. My sense is that FUBAR was just an old nickname that some boys a long time ago had given him because they were boys a long time ago. But I was as oblivious then as I am now, so who knows. I do know that before graduation my friend Taylor and I stole a personalized From the Desk of, &c. notepad off of his desk, and he found out about it some time later because I used a sheet from it to write a thank-you note to my college counselor, who helped me get into a much better college than I deserved to, and it was reported back to me that FUBAR was amused. He has been dead for a quarter century, as has my college counselor. I think I still have the rest of that pad somewhere, but I wouldn’t know who to write to using it.

I’ve gotten a little deeper into all of this than was strictly necessary because I’ve been putting off saying what I want to say about the bad thing that has happened: it’s really, really bad. I don’t need to go into how right now. As I said on here a couple of weeks before election day, Trump is a bully who’s never demonstrated he has any interest in right or wrong, the Constitution, or the welfare of other people. A few days after that, again on here, I was wondering about the effects of seeing a man like that on our ubiquitous screens, on us and especially on the youngest of us. And a couple of days ago I was thinking about my students’ reaction to what happened the day before. His presidency very well could be as much of a disaster for the people he’s conned into thinking he will take care of them as for the people who know he won’t. Most of my students seem to think it will be a disaster for them, for people they love, and for people they don’t know but don’t want to see hurt, and I can’t say they’re wrong.

My question for right now is which kind of FUBAR we are. Are we Fucked Up Beyond All Repair? Or are we just Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition? Is there a difference? Say it’s the latter. Many people are saying they don’t recognize their country anymore, seeing so many of their neighbors vote for someone they think we all ought to have rejected a long time ago. Is that the kind of FUBAR we are? If so, can we imagine the country becoming more like we thought it was, more like we want it to be? Can we hope that our neighbors will wake up to the reality of what just happened, to what the country will really be like under Trump 2, to what he will do to them too?

Or say it’s the former, that we’re Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. He’s packed the courts with people who don’t seem to care about the law except in terms of what it can do for certain people, classes, religions. He’s got legislators and captains of industry in line. He’s got journalists bothsidesing the apocalypse. (On tonight’s panel, for an opposing view, Satan.) He’s got some people scared and some people feeling they’ve been given permission not just to think but to say and do what they say we all are already thinking and have always wanted to say and do. (Except we weren’t, and we haven’t.) He’s got everything lined up for four years of unbridled meanness and limitless corruption.

Maybe the most important question for right now isn’t which kind of FUBAR we are. But maybe it is–maybe we can’t ask ourselves any other questions about what to do, or what we can learn from how we got here, or how we can end up somewhere better, until we answer that. And the answer won’t in the end be about facts. It will be about what we want to accept. Knowing how hard so many people worked for an outcome different from the one we have apparently gotten, I don’t think Beyond Repair is it.

In the Homestretch

One of the worst things about US politics is our campaigns–the incredible length, the obscene amounts of money, the pandering both to the base and to the ever-shrinking number of somehow, unbelievably, inexplicably undecided. The horse race coverage by journalists doesn’t help, milking the drama for clicks, leaving their obligation to inform by the wayside, save for scandals and gaffes. Following the metaphor of the campaign as something to be handicapped and bet on, we’re in the homestretch. We’ve rounded the final turn, we’re headed to the finish line.

So this campaign season is over in a day or so, and it couldn’t end soon enough. As my future state senator put it yesterday:

Absolutely furious at whoever decided to move clocks back this weekend and add an extra hour to the election
— Stephen Webber 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@s_webber) November 2, 2024

I knocked a few doors yesterday, just supporting my wife, who’s knocked a million. I have been mostly reading too much, giving what I can, worrying, blogging into the void. I’ve been going to some campaign events and, as always, have been impressed by the hard-working, heart-in-the-right place state politicians I’ve encountered. Yesterday I met Crystal Quade, the Democratic candidate for governor, who Missourians, if they knew what was good for them, would elect, but if there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that people have been voting against their own interests every two years for decades.

Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas was published the summer we moved to “the real America,” as one Missourian described the Midwest to us after finding we’d just moved here from New York City. For the past twenty years, we’ve watched gerrymandering, culture wars, and the nimble weaponizing of bigotry and xenophobia turn our new home state from purple to ostensibly red; as a result, we’ve watched the politics and the governing get meaner, we’ve watched support of public goods and private rights erode, and we’ve tried to do what we can to fight it. It’s been tempting to give up on Missouri, just as watching the national GOP elevate its worst to the top of their party has made it easy to despair for the country, but we can’t. We have to hope.

One hope is that what’s the matter with the undecideds of Kansas, Missouri, and the country is that they just don’t have all the information they need, and that the armies of people out knocking doors and making calls can get that information to them in time. The other, more realistic hope is that the decided but under-motivated will be moved to turn out and do their part to get the right people past the finish line first so they can move on and do the actual work of public service.

Of course it’s not a race, it’s not a sport, it’s not a game, it’s not even very much fun. It’s staving off the worst of the current GOP agenda and doing it for women, people of color, people from elsewhere, queer people, people who value public education and the Constitution and all of the better ideas and impulses we have. Nobody needs me to tell them about it this close to election day:

1730829600

days

hours minutes seconds

until

Election Day

Nobody needs me to tell them anything, probably. Sometimes it just makes me feel better, in the midst of all of this anxiety and all of this outrage, to say some things. Sometimes it makes me feel better to say that in spite of this country’s mixed history and all of the hate and bigotry and selfishness we’ve seemed happy to display over the past few centuries, we can be better. We’re not better than this–we are all we’ve done and all we continue to do–but we could be better. One of the ways we can is to vote for people who want that. And help get the information to others that might help them do it too.

I’ll see you on the other side of election day.

& & &

A young visitor to my house on Halloween used our sticky “blood” letters to spell out this message on our porch door. Knowing that I can’t ask him what his intent was in crafting this message, and aware of the intentional fallacy, I choose to interpret it as a comment on the election. It says, to the clever Republican politicians who know better and the idiots who don’t, to the liars of the alternate reality universe, to the spineless and/or craven oligarchs, and to the saps who have fallen for the Man Who Will Say What We Were Thinking But Wouldn’t Say in Public, thinking he gives a shit about them: we won’t let you put him in office again. That’s what I think it says. Say it with me.