Last night I was Ubering and I got a ride request at the old landmark Johnnies Coffee Shop on Fairfax and Wilshire. It was lit up like Christmas and surrounded with placard bearing Bernie people cheering at passing cars. The exterior had been Bernie-ified with hagiographic muraling and artwork.
Enthusiasm was infectious. My rider, a young man bedazzled in campaign togs and paraphernalia, reluctantly broke away from a group of friends plotting Election Day volunteer assignments. Door knocking? Yes! Phone banking? We’ll do that too!
He needed to get home, to Beverly Hills, in time for curfew. And by Beverly Hills, I mean all the way up, as Fat Joe would say, way up past the Hotel, past the reservoir where Jake Gittes lost the tip of his nose, up where the architectural showcases perch on the spines of the ridge tops looking down the city like glass box gargoyles. He was 17.
“Tomorrow 8 PM, is going to be the most stressful day of my life, even more than the SAT.”
I asked him for a prediction. Even though he was unable to cast a ballot, he didn’t want to jinx it. As a backstop, there was always the hope of a Hillary indictment before July. But he hoped they didn’t need it.
Tomorrow is now today and in a few hours, by the time most of you have read this, we will know the answer to the first question.
He talked on, cheerfully dogmatic, about the banks and the oil companies running the country, how they had to be stopped, and how that would help put an end to inequality. He was a Mini-Me Bernie, minus the Brooklyn accent, chattering away in the back seat, texting friends, making plans. He was so sweet about it, one couldn’t mock him, even in the privacy of one’s thoughts.
If nothing else, this primary election, the first to matter in my lifetime, found a way of gathering a critical mass of idealists to each side. None were more positive and hopeful, in LA anyway, than the Bernie people. It speaks well of them.
When I got home I turned on the TV and saw that MSNBC had “called” the election for Hillary, before any ballots had been counted.
I had to look up “hagiographic.” Excellent vocabulary there. It’s my word for the day.
I’ll say this again. The role of whoever becomes the next president is to oversee the breaking and glueing back together of the country. The glue will be war. I’m not a hawk. I’m not looking for war. I don’t even have a particular enemy in mind. But that’s how these things tend to get resolved… Historically.
Fascinating how people project onto their candidates. “He’s going to fight for the little guy! He’s against banks and big business and Wall Street. He’s going to fight corruption and bring back real democracy.” One old man.
And then we have the other side, a narcissist whose supporters sport large stomach and big baseball caps and talk about “Making America Great Again” without any plan to do so but are sure it must involve building a big, long wall to keep out Muslims and Mexicans.
To wrap it all up, we have a battle tested former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State who stinks of corruption and corporate glad handing and who is always drenched in something foul smelling and under investigation. Oh what fun her administration will be!
Oh, the enthusiasm of youth. That boy’s going to need to find something new to do in a few weeks. What do you think it will be?
While it’s irrefutable that Secretary Clinton ran a covert e-mail-based spy agency at home, slipped Vince Foster a few extra pills, and personally executed four proud Americans at Benghazi, there is a reason she’s perpetually under investigation. It’s what opposition parties do rather than pass laws or create programs. They investigate and if those investigations encompass years, all the better.
She is very corporate, for sure.
“…Oh, the enthusiasm of youth. That boy’s going to need to find something new to do in a few weeks. What do you think it will be?”
Summer camp.