Listen: Basically all consumer goods are imported.Go through your things now and look for labels: your phone, tv, and computer are Chinese; your shirts are Bangladeshi and Cambodian, your pants Mexican and Nicaraguan. There is exactly one U.S. factory making men’s underwear; those undies are awesome, and cost ~$28 each.
(art by DonkeyHotey)
If Trump places a 35% tariff on foreign goods, you’ll need a $6,000/year raise in order to keep treading water (in that your spending on imported manufactured goods—about 38% of the average American household budget—will go up by 35%). Alternately, you can spend $28 for each pair of Made in the USA underwear, $12 for every pair of socks, and I guess not have an iPhone or TV or vitamin supplements or anything with a rare-earth magnet in it (i.e., a computer, a hybrid car, many power tools, many car covers…the list goes on).
Inflation-Adjusted U.S. Household Income 1966–2015 (source)
The only reason that most Americans haven’t noticed that our real (inflation-adjusted) household incomes have been flat since 1965 is because we’ve enjoyed the enormous savings on manufactured goods that comes with globalization. I’m foggy on why anyone wants to give that up—even if, by some crippled miracle, a huge tariff leads to t-shirt and underwear manufacturing returning to U.S. soil, we don’t have the capacity to produce those things at volume any more. I think there’s only a single jersey cotton weaving mill left in the U.S. It would take years to get factories retooled (or, hell, built; many of those old factories are now lofts, open-plan offices, and unoccupiable attractive nuisances). In the meantime you have the same crappy job you did in October, and you’re paying 35% more for the same shoes and kids pajamas and phone chargers and disposable razors.
So what were Trump voters voting for if it wasn’t the economy, stupid? I really can’t imagine; I didn’t vote for him.
Chico and the portal guy were waiting for me outside FDA Annex D. Chico was smoking a cigarette. If this was a screenplay, his entire character description would read “sinister Mexican.” The portal guy was just standing there, hands in pockets, staring up at the stars and whistling that “Yakkety Sax” song from Benny Hill. He abruptly cut off as I climbed out of my car.
“This is your New Guy?” he asked Chico. The portal guy was one of those cheap-blue-oxford-&-khaki-pants cubicle drones, but younger and skinnier than the stock character. He looked pretty damn rumpled—not just “it’s three a.m.” tired, although it was three a.m. It was more the “I’m tired of my whole stupid life” kind of tired. Chico blew twin streams of smoke out his nose, flicking away his cigarette butt without acknowledging the portal guy’s question.
“New guy?” I mugged like a vaudevillian, joining them at the glass door, “What happened to the old guy?”
“Gal,” the portal guy answered as he waved us in through the glass doors of FDA Annex D. “She got burned as a witch.” . . .
This started out as index-cards and long-hand on legal pads, which is SOP for me.
For those with a taste for “inside baseball”: The original working title of this novella was “Colonial Meth.” That is an awful title—but still an improvement over “Time-Portal Crystal Meth Missionaries,” which is what I scrawled at the top of the first index card. If you squint, you can see that the first legal-pad draft is already titled “Where There is Nothing, There is God”—a title I cribbed from William Butler Yeats by way of my old pal Fritz Swanson.
I’m not sure when I started the index cards for this story (these tend to get carried around in my pocket and taped to the bathroom mirror for a few months while I mull a story over) or the long-hand legal-pad draft, but I’ve got typed draft pages with creation dates as old as November 2013. My submissions log indicates I first sent this out in November 2014—so I guess it took a year to write/revise—and then basically another year-and-a-half to sell (the story was actually accepted in March of 2016), and several more months to revise to everyone’s satisfaction, proof, etc.
The full original draft, through its many iterations, stands ~3.25 inches tall. I have no idea why I kept it.
“The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”
It seems like we finally have an excellent test as to whether or not the Electoral College is worth the inequality it introduces to an already highly unequal system[1]:
On the one hand, we have a popularly elected candidate with an enormous margin of victory (roughly 2.5 million votes?) who is highly qualified, thoroughly vetted, and has spent so many decades as a public servant that she is a very thoroughly known quantity. On the other we have a historically unpopular candidate who has continued to behave in alarmingly erratic fashion since his election—for example, threatening to dismantle the First Amendment and strip individuals of their natural-born citizenship, as well as questioning the legitimacy of the election he won—who keeps himself cloaked in secrecy, is drowning in conflicts of interest, and eked out electoral victory on a technicality almost certainly because of the concerted effort of a foreign power antagonistic to US interests.
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
(DISCLOSURE: The first clause of the top tweet is untrue—see graph below—and the second clause entirely unsubstantiated. The lower tweet ignores two decades of judicial precedence and sorta suggests that the PotUS should be able to jail people at will; both overstep the bounds of the Executive Branch.)
“Instead, if the electoral college is to control who becomes our president, we should take it seriously by understanding its purpose precisely. It is not meant to deny a reasonable judgment by the people. It is meant to be a circuit breaker — just in case the people go crazy.”
Or, as in the case this year, that the system itself seems to have been substantially short-circuited (or, perhaps more chillingly, to have become so well understood that it is now a completely deterministic game, like checkers—see also “The Book“—and thus will evermore be owned by folks with the talent for low intrigue, the little arts of popularity, and the technology to leverage radical uncertainty in a cognitively exhausted populace).
Others think differently from Lessig—Orin Kerr being the standout example—but I don’t know that I’m persuaded by Kerr’s thinking, which seems extremely obtuse, mostly because it treats an actual matter of life and death (think I’m being hyperbolic? Tell that to 100,000 dead Iraqis and Afghans, courtesy of President G.W. Bush) as though it’s a damned game of groundies. If you’re more into fantasy fiction, this novel Electoral College solution strikes me as simultaneously both more realistic and more far-fetched than anything else I’ve seen—which is kinda par for the course this year, right?Shit, given how 2016 has gone, I wouldn’t be shocked if we ended up with a Romney/Stein inauguration come January.
At any rate, taken at face value, we now will finally know:If Trump is inaugurated next January—contrary to the will of a clear majority of Americans who cast votes which were counted (a number that is itself a subset of the total votes cast, and a sadly small subset of the total adult American population) and despite serious flaws in character and qualification—then the Electoral College has certainly outlived its usefulness, and it’s time to make a big change.
If someone else—hell, almost anyone else—is inaugurated in 44 days, then we’ll finally really and truly know what the Electoral College is for in the 21st Century.
You can’t take care of anyone else if it takes all of your available energy just to keep your shit together and function.I made myself this “survival” playlist and listen to it first thing every morning while I’m writing; I’m not sure all the choices make sense to the general public, but they all buoy my spirit.Make your own survival playlist and listen to it religiously.Keep your heart, kid!
Wigged out that the erratic President-Elect—either through his business practices or bellicosity—will trigger (or maybe somehow worse, fail to trigger) a Constitutional crisis? Give monthly to the ACLU.
Wigged out about the shouts to repeal Obamacare?Call your congressional reps and call Paul Ryan, who has set up a sort of voice-mail straw poll to take the temperature of the electorate on this issue:202.225.3031.Doing both of these will only take you a few minutes, tops.
Wigged out about voter suppression and election rigging? I talked to my state rep, Jeff Irwin, at the local coffee shop.He pointed me to this very good project for fixing our damned-near broken electoral college system: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/He also suggest you should work in your state to support expansion (or creation) of early voting and a shift to “universal absantee ballot” If you want to support the Greens’ recounts, you can still give money to fund that (recounts are paid for by whoever requests them—not the public at large; I’ve already kicked in). More importantly, you can volunteer to help with the recount itself in MI, WI, and PA. It looks like they’re maybe getting deluged with trolls spamming their forms, so I’m sure honest, legit volunteers are much appreciated right now.
Wigged out about access to women’s health services?I spoke to Sarah Erdreich—author ofGeneration Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement—and she noted that the best place to give is as locally as possible:“A lot of the effects will be felt by women that need the services but won’t be able to afford them. … as long as the government is still funding non-[abortion]-related services at PP[Planned Parenthood] health clinics, it has a guaranteed funding source. … Near-term, a lot of the issues women have with accessing PP’s [abortion] services as financial, so if the local PP has a way to accept donations targeted towards defraying the cost for patients, that would be the most immediate. If they don’t, check out NNAF—Nat’l Network of Abortion Funds—and see what independent clinics in the area have set up.” Here’s the direct link that allows you to give to state/regional/local Planned Parenthood organizations.Sarah especially supports the Willie Parker Fund for Abortion Access in the South; the map on this page will help you find similar funds in your area.
Wigged out about hate crimes?Wear the safety pin—but more importantly, cultivate a good natured and incredulous: “Hunh.You don’t really believe that, do you?”Practice saying it with a squint and smile, and deploy it frequently when someone gets out of line.Gently obliging someone to articulate their feelings and acknowledge the repercussions of what they say, and to own those words—or, hopefully, to decide they don’t really want to own those words and where they lead.The safety pin is a nice outward symbol, because I like the idea of “safety” in the safety pin, and of being a presence to help calm the nervous. But more importantly, for my own mental health, I like to dwell on what a safety pin is for: We use them in an emergency to hold our shit together long enough to get somewhere safe and really assess what repairs we need to move forward.And, goddamned if we ain’t in that place right now, brothers and sisters.
BONUS ROUND: Wear the flag, too—not with snark or irony or upside-down, but with pride. Let us not cede our unified identity to the haters. E pluribus unum; the Union forever.
spent weeks saying that election results contradicting polling results—which is exactly what we have right now—would mean “a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government”). . .
. . . and, golly, who knows what tomorrow might bring!After all, it’s the Free-Market Russians that rigged us, but we ended up with the old Chinese curse:
Jill Stein and the goddamned Green Party are collecting money to perform recounts in three states.She already has the money to trigger a re-County Wisconsin[ed.: in the 24-hours since I wrote that, Stein collected ~$3 million more to support this work] cover recount-request paperwork filing fees in all three states, but she still need another ~$3mil to cover the costs of an actual hand recount.
This almost certainly isn’t going to change the election, but anything worth knowing is worth knowing True and Sure—and facts are always worth repeating:If you backed him or not, it’s important to reiterate that the President-Elect is the Second-Place Winner.He doesn’t have a “mandate,” he doesn’t represent a beleaguered “silent majority.”He isn’t the voice of the “Real America.”He won on a technicality—which is very much like him—and anyone continuing to put a thorn in his side (and the sides of those who need to strut around spouting his bullshit) is most definitely doing God’s Work.
Just to give you a sense of how truly, absurdly close this election was, and how imprecise election-night numbers are:Michigan has been counted as a Trump win since Election Night, but we didn’t actually officially declare a winner here until the night before Thanksgiving.In the day-after-the-election estimate, Trump had won by ~13,000 votes out of ~4.5 million cast—absurdly close.By the time the true, official tabulation was released two nights ago, that lead had been reduced by about one-quarter, to 10,704 votes; for context roughly 10,000 people buy a dog at any given time Tigers game—and the tigers are sucky unpopular team.This is the closest election in Michigan history, and the first time the state has gone red for PotUS since 1988.Also, this is a state where Trump handily lost the Republican primary, and where he sank in the polls immediately after visiting (although, again, I’m not saying there was a fix in Michigan: This is also a state where black turnout was significantly depressed without apparent outside jiggery-pokery, and which had no new obstructions to voting put in place since 2012).
I kicked Stein a few bucks, even though I’m moderately furious with her and the Green Party and how they ran their campaign here in Michigan (short version: They ran against HRC—not against War, or the the Establishment, or Trump, just against HRC.Like, their goddamned lawn signs said “NO HRC” on them.Clinton lost Michigan by ~10k votes; Stein got ~50k votes.i.e., it isn’t hard to imagine that if Stein had maybe–I dunno, run against the Status Quo instead of the Other Woman–maybe Clinton would have scraped out a win here, to the tune of 16 EC votes—still a Clinton loss nationally, but you’d have 4 million fewer broken hearts here in the Mitten.So, yeah: Fuck Jill Stein and the Green party.Having lived through this shit twice now, to the tune of two wars and countless tens of thousands of dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, I feel pretty confident when I say that I would sooner vote to have both my hands burned off with molten lead than I’d vote for a Green Party candidate.)Every last penny you donate via this form goes to recount efforts; none to Jill, none to the Greens, just toward making a colossal fuck-up a touch less wrong.Excess funds go toward their work on election integrity and voting system reform.I may think the Greens are a sack of dicks, but I 100% agree with them about election integrity and voting reform, and trust them to do the Good Work on those issues.’cause, at the very least, the Greens are ass-hats, but they aren’t crooks.
This election has, quite literally, been a Tragedy:It was won on suppression and lost on discouragement. On that alone it is an abomination and complete failure of our Democratic System, callously used in a fashion opportunistic and anti-democratic ON ALL SIDES AND BY ALL PARTIES.This is a small step toward restoring it.Let’s hold hands, hold our noses, and take that step together.
This is, in my humble, a damn-near perfect gag—which is saying something, because I find single-camera laugh-track situation comedies almost entirely unbearable to watch.
I hope your day is good and sweet. Gobblegobble!
(If you wanna read more of my thoughts on this specific gag and what it can teach writers, you can do so here.)
Use LOGIC to come to your conclusions, but appeal to others’ ETHICS and EMOTIONS to persuade them.Speak honestly and authentically about your own experience.
Here’s an example of how I might apply this in conversation:
“I totally hear that you feel like the country has made some big, jarring shifts in the last eight years, and you feel left out in the cold. But here’s the thing: I’ve been surprised by the number of Jews I know who’ve taken steps since the election to be sure that they and their children can leave the country in a hurry. But not super surprised, because my wife and I did so, too. And that didn’t take eight years; it took two weeks.”
