We don’t know what we don’t want to know.
Half of us want to pretend we can have millions of loose ballots entering the system without a chain of custody, a point of origin, a signature match (in certain states), a valid postmark, or election day arrival (in certain states), and the result will be legitimate. Just like any other election. Only unpersons who watch OANN would say otherwise.
The other half wants to pretend by pointing to implausible statistical anomalies, 4 am drop-offs of boxes of president-only ballots, fractional vote counting, disabled signature readers, count rooms without poll watchers…if we can just cleanse the outcome of its fraudulent elements, we will turn back time and un-ring the election.
Who or what is going to enforce this? The Pentagon won’t. The Supreme Court will only nibble at the periphery, on behalf of states to decide their own electors. A state legislature can look at the evidence and decide to invalidate its own voters. Theoretically. Is this likely? What would Lord Bezos say?
We are all ostriches now.
Fun fact: a hundred years ago, pre-Disneyland, you could rent an ostrich cart and take it for a spin on the streets of Los Angeles. The collapse of feathered fashion in the Edwardian Era British Empire led to a repurposing of the flightless bird around the world.
Our relationship with animals was altogether different. We were comfortable with intimate cruelty. Does it have legs? Tie off its beak and take a ride. And why not? Animals were living tools and locomotion.
Does it have feathers? Pluck them, make a scarf. Put them on a hat. Hungry? Put a sock on its head and grab a hatchet. I had an ostrich burger once, at Hamburger Mary’s in WeHo and it was delicious. Ironically, it was a drag queen bingo benefit for a no-kill animal shelter.
Los Angeles once boasted ten ostrich farms, sourced from South Africa. The largest of them, the Cawston Ostrich Farm, is now live-work lofts, of course. Because every structure formerly industrious shall now be a textured backdrop for an Instagrammable life.
Los Angeles also had an alligator farm. A hundred years ago, this was us. We had a different sense of safety. But also no factory farms. We knew where our food came from. We plucked our own chickens but we wouldn’t have understood Chicken McNuggets. Unless one was rather well off, one ate meat once a week and gazed upon animals in the field and thought: protein. We didn’t think about writing a check to PETA. Our diseases were of malnutrition. Now they are of gluttony.
One last irony. Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand to hide from the facts of the world. The sand is where they keep their eggs. They are checking up on things. They are engaged in self-preservation.
The British empire is with us no longer, but we can taste the memory of it in cask-conditioned ale at MacLeod. A century ago when ostriches trod the streets of L.A., communism was ascendant, yet the Soviet empire is no longer.
American collapse is within our grasp. Telling everyone to stay home while the government prints money is a good start. Creating parallel voting systems, one for Detroit and Philly, another for the rest of the country, is the next step.
*top photo: climate change protest, Bondi Beach
