I’m not being set free today but I feel like it. There is an election, once again, that I filed for and that I was hopelessly unable to wrap my arms around and it is coming to an end. I have not updated my campaign webpage or put much in the blog for the three weeks that this primary day has been on my countdown. I’m hardly wracked by guilt at letting down the folks I chatted with as I pushed my boulder up the hill that Sisyphus couldn’t master either. It helped however to have come to a plan of action for what will follow the General election early this November.
I’ll get to that in a later post but now I’ll iterating some of my early primary day reading.
I woke up at 7:30 having switched from watching some French programing to seeing what was on my Tik Tok connection. Its probably algorithmically sending me what I want to see but I’ll admit it was both heartening and addictive. There were a passel of short takes on the campaign that pretty well eviscerated the GOP camp. They did much better in their few short seconds than my turgid eight-minute-reads of explaining the Trumplification of America. Americans with today’s shorter attention spans will make the Republican Party struggle to hang on them when they become the majority voting bloc. No wonder the fear of China’s doing to America what the anti-Lincoln Republicans have done has required Trump to curry Tic Toc’s favor by saying nice things about the online venue. Not that Tik Tokers have reciprocated.
I turned on NPR as I read the New York Times. Before the Internet I would have spend an hour or two reading the Duluth News Tribune. If I spent an hour a week perusing the DNT today I’d be surprised. I’ll eventually look at the Washington Post as well but I read a sobering assessment of Putin’s success in making America cower. I read excerpts of an interview with today’s best analyst of political Polls Nate Silver. I read a column about the future of the Republican Party if Trump loses. I sent a heavily graphic article to my email for later reading on the massive destruction of Canada’s vast forests through fire that is racing ahead of its replacement by nature.
These stories led me to additional reading. The Nate Silver interview led me to google of how it was that Elon, I love Donald Trump, Muskmellon became rich. Silver speaks from the gambling perspective about Venture Capitalists and told a story about Peter Thiel the gay Christiany billionaire who was in a very pricy half million dollar car of Musk’s racing off to the deal that would create Paypal that is the basis of both men’s super fortunes. The car a McLaren is the same kind that Wisconsinite Mrs. Walton has a half dozen of. Mrs. Walton has been in Duluth’s news for buying up the tail end of our Park Point for a pickle ball Mecca. She scotched that idea when Duluthians didn’t like getting pushed around by the mega rich. I only care about cars getting from Point A to Point B so I’m not interested in cars eight times more expensive than Maseraties. And I can’t recall the Wisconsinite’s name at the moment. You can google it with pickle ball and Park Point but I’m rather pleased to have forgotten a billionaire’s name. (BTW I just read that Thiel will not be supporting Trump because of all the culture war on trans kids coming from the rapist’s mouth)
The columnist who wrote about the end of Trump years mentioned a book I was immediately interested in. It was called the end of the Whigs. I was going to order it until I saw it was 1250 pages long. But that got me interested in reading a summary and I found one I’m still chewing on.
All of this reading took me about 2 hours and fifteen minutes. While I was listening to NPR I heard about buying tickets for the very funny NPR show Wait, Wait, don’t tell me that Claudia and I often catch on weekends. It’s coming to Minnesota at the end of the month. I suggested buying tickets and now that I don’t have to campaign……although I’m not done with this election…..we bought tickets. I must say I don’t go to shows much these days and the roughly $250.00 cost per person was sobering. My first thought on hearing the price tag was holy mackerel there are a lot of people with money out there buying tickets to Taylor Swift concerts. I’m sure our tickets were a pittance in comparison.
I did minimal proofing as I wrote this. I finished my coffee and enjoyed some malted milk balls. Soon I’ll cast my ballot for the primary. Later I’ll start storing all my political stuff for this campaign out of sight except for the stuff I intend to keep passing out. I think I’ve settled on keeping my finger in the political waters. It may no long be possible to reincarnate Abe Lincoln but I started my journey in Duluth fifty years ago to bring something of his spirit to the GOP. I saw a bit of it last night on Tik Tok where someone posted John McCain being booed by his voters when he told them Obama was a good family man and they wanted to believe the newly elected president was an Arab terrorist.
