CSotD: One Day More
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Even Edison Lee (KFS), though far too young to vote, understands what’s at stake tomorrow. I remember the anticipation and sense of helplessness in 1968, when we were, as the song said, “old enough to kill, but not for voting.”
Lowering the voting age to match the draft age made sense, though — technical point — while 18-year-olds had to register, you didn’t get drafted until you were 19.
However, you still couldn’t vote until you were 21, so a lot of US ground troops in Vietnam were not full citizens.
A running gag in Candorville (KFS) is Clyde switching away from serious coverage until he finds, and settles back with, Gilligan’s Island reruns.
Breaking the pattern in this morning’s strip is an indication that Darrin Bell hopes people are taking the election seriously, though he may be overly idealistic.
Needless to say, we watched the news with great interest back in the ’60s, but we had little choice. In a world of three networks, you had to make an effort to avoid knowing what was going on, because, aside from a few independent stations in major markets, there weren’t many alternatives.
The networks carried presidential addresses and election coverage and often interrupted regular programming for major news events.
As depicted here, Clyde has no choice, since Gilligan was pre-empted. We’d be a stronger, better nation if that were ever the case anymore, but I’ve already ranted on that topic and somehow I wasn’t able to change the world.
Perhaps Darrin will have better luck.
Matt Wuerker (Politico) takes a safer approach, assigning the work to Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty, an amorphous pair who represent the responsible members of society.
We generally see Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty as “all of us,” but in connection with today’s Candorville, it’s important to recognize that we also have a substantial population who remain untouched by the world around them.
That’s not a cynical observation. It’s just a plain fact.
Where it becomes cynical is when someone rounds up the mob — legally or spontaneously — to oppose somebody who has offended morality or practiced witchcraft or registered minority voters or been accused of eating people’s dogs and cats.
It’s happened before, it will likely happen again, and the open question is how far things go before the people who are part of that Uncle Sam/Lady Liberty demographic recognize the need to step up, declare their presence and assert their values over the mob.
Benjamin Slyngstad feels the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade, and Trump’s pride in having stacked the courts to bring it about, may be sufficient to awaken a response from women.
He’s not going out on a limb, because, while we haven’t seen crowds of women in the street as we did in the Pussy Hat Demonstrations, we’ve seen full crowds at Kamala Harris rallies with a decidedly distaff flavor, though certainly accompanied by plenty of sympathetic men.
One apparent factor in the early voting is that there seems to be a large number of older women turning in their ballots.
We tend to think of older voters as conservative, but the women who were 20 when Ms. Magazine published this confrontational announcement in 1972 are 72 years old today, and they haven’t forgotten the way things were before Roe v Wade was decided a year later.
We shall see.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The whole world is indeed watching, and if certain despots are hoping to add an American leader to their club, a great many other foreign observers are feeling helpless and deeply concerned over a choice they have no say in.
Baron fixes particularly on climate change, and she’s right that we’re at a tipping point in that process at the same time we seem to be at a tipping point in which direction the Americans are heading. Our nation not only has its own specific impact on the environment but also the impact of its leadership among developed and developing nations.
Trump is not only directly opposed to green policies on a seeming knee-jerk basis, and allied with plutocrats who couldn’t care less about a future beyond next quarter’s profit figures, but he seems as ignorant about our energy issues as he is about tariffs, ignoring our steady production figures and pledging to drill, baby, drill in order to fill a gap that exists only in his imagination.
Add to that his fanciful notions of how electric vehicles operate and there’s plenty of reason to hope he never gets into the White House with a compliant Congress in tow.
Meanwhile, Guy Body widens the world’s fear and thus increases the sense of pressure American voters ought to be feeling, though I wish they were all either well-informed or else had decided to stay home and watch Gilligan instead of voting.
If only that were really the way in which we’re divided!
Tomorrow, we vote. Some of the voters will believe that Haitians eat pets, that the economy is in decline and that Ginger sure packed a lot of clothes for a three-hour tour.
Others perhaps share Morten Morland‘s view of how the Republican Party has morphed in the past decade, and what they bring to the table, and to the nation.
One day more, and we’ll get to hear what which people sing loudest.
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