Dispatch From Trumplandia: Double-Agenting 4 Kamala

I am as sick of this upcoming election as I’ve ever been of anything in my life.

I’m no fan of Kamala Harris’s.

As San Francisco and later California’s attorney general, Harris refused to charge cops for the use of excessive force. She tried to cover up a huge scandal in San Francisco’s crime lab. She fought a court order mandating the release of state prisoners due to overcrowding. She shoehorned in a law making it a criminal misdemeanor—with a penalty of up to one year of jail time—for parents of elementary and middle school kids who “allow” their offspring to miss more than 10 percent of school days. (Who gets hit by legislation like this? Black and Hispanic parents.)

Word on the street was that Harris was the consummate opportunist. She paid lip service to progressive ideals but, in fact, was a blood-&-guts prosecutor.

You’d think Republicans would be lining up to vote for her.

I won’t bash her in a public forum, but I will cheerfully confess to all 4.3 of my readers here that, in my opinion, her propensity to flip-flop and say one thing while thinking another makes her a flawed candidate.

I’m supporting Harris in the current election for two reasons: (1) She’s not Donald Trump and (2) unlike Hillary Clinton, she’s not the enabling spouse of a rapist.

Anyway, I went out canvassing for her yesterday. In the hamlet of Wallkill. Which is solid Trumplandia, so I didn’t have a productive day.



Early capitalism had nothing to model itself on but feudalism, so it did things like subsidize employee housing: The hamlet of Wallkill mostly consists of the craftsmen cottages that Gail Borden built in the early 19-somethings for all the workers at the Borden milk factory.

Halloween is a big, big deal in the hamlet of Wallkill. The decorations are rather sweet:







This one was my favorite:



I got sick while I was canvassing. That strange loopy feeling that’s generally a precursor to fainting. And my hip joints ached.

This new higher dose of Synthroid has me more disinterested in food than ever, & I’m continuing to lose weight that I don’t need to lose.

It’s not anorexia because with anorexia, you may not be eating but you continue to be obsessed with food. I’m not obsessed with food. I hardly ever think about food because I hardly ever get hungry. I forget to eat—which I’d done yesterday, which is why I was probably in the pre-stage of dizziness.

But the joint pain! What was up with that? Was this the onset of one of my (mercifully) rare psoriatic arthritis attacks?

Whatever, I got all my steps in canvassing (since the hamlet of Wallkill is a walking route) and spent the rest of the day Remunerating & reading Barbra Streisand’s autobiography.

I have never liked Streisand’s acting or singing voice, but she grew up in the same part of Brooklyn as my mother & her sisters, went to the same high school—Erasmus Hall!—as my mother & her sisters. So, the parts about her childhood were interesting. The subsequent 1,000 pages are every bit as smarmy & self-congratulatory as you imagine, so I spot-read here & there & then returned the book to the library early.