Why This Election WANTS You to Be Nuts. Plus Unicorns

[mallorys_camera]

This election is driving people nuts. I mean literally nuts. The degree of anxiety, frustration, and disassociative rage is not to be believed. Even in New York City where HRC polls at something like 70%.

I honestly don’t get it.

Fivethirtyeight.com has become the equivalent of bird entrails. People are logging in five, ten, fifteen times a day. Omigawd – she’s under 70%! He’s close to a third! North Carolina is going red!

It’s like some vast computer simulation game we’re all playing constantly.

I wonder what happens when the election is over?

I’m fairly certain we go on playing the game in some guise, shape, or form. It’s the new reality. It benefits someone – media? American politicians? shadowy Chinese billionaires? the manufacturers of antidepressants? – if we’re all kept in a perpetual state of uncertainty and panic.

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Here’s the deal: In the last 30 years of elections, all polls have tended to tighten up in the week or so before a Presidential election, and furthermore, said tightening turns out to have virtually zero effects on the final results.

The media needs a horse race right up to the end. That’s how the media sells ads. They want the election to be close for the same reason that they want the Superbowl to be close. When the Superbowl’s a blowout, the fans tend to check out early. And nobody wants that: There’s too much money riding on it.

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Polling is predictive in a general sense, but it’s ridiculous to read too much into the last minute wriggling of a graph. This election has been characterized by an extraordinary degree of partisanship. Pollsters like to prattle about the “undecideds,” but I don’t think there have been too may “undecideds" in this election: The contrast between the two candidates is just too stark. I suspect most people made up their minds who they were going to vote for weeks and weeks ago.

There’s not a doubt in my mind that HRC is going to win.

And there’s not a doubt in my mind that her win is not gonna result in significant positive changes. Some people rise to the level of the trust that’s placed in them, but I don’t think she’s one of them.

True, HRC is marginally less creepy than Trump. But that still makes her creepy.

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In other news, met up with BB for some excellent pastries at a little Haitian bakery close to Atlantic Avenue and then tromped down to the Hassid nerve center on Kingston Avenue to do cultural anthropology.

Then met up with Summer and Spring at Fort Tryon for an afternoon at the Cloisters:



I’d forgotten that the famous Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries are at the Cloisters! The tapestries are just amazingly evocative and beautiful and strange, and one wonders how, in a culture that was dominated by a genuinely creepy religion (Medieval Roman Catholicism), something this lyrical and yes, almost playful could have been created. I suppose they must have been woven toward the very beginning of the Renaissance. And definitely not in Spain!

On the subway ride back into Brooklyn, I read a copy of The Best American Short Stories 2014 that I’d scored for a buck from a street seller and eavesdropped on two teenage boys, crumpers, who were speedrapping madly about dance moves and shoes, high-fiving at frequent intervals.

In the tunnel between Manhattan and Brooklyn, they decided to dance.

They were not particularly good. That might have been the confines of a semi-crowded subway car, I don’t know. They took out their little music blaster from a knapsack, did a few athletic pole swings, some aggressive floor moves, the little robots that could.

But something about them just made me start to weep.

They were just so sassy and filled with bravado. Little Mercutios! I could just see their dreams floating around them. And I knew exactly what was going to happen to those dreams.

I emptied out all the cash in my pockets and gave it to them.

This is one of the reasons I make it a point never to carry around very much cash by the way – because I have a tendency to give it all away. To random strangers. Which aging pensioner that I am is not a smart thing to do.

I remained sad, sad, sad for the rest of the evening. If I think about those boys too hard, my eyes will well up with tears right now.

Which is insane. The kids were obviously enjoying themselves.

It is the blight man was born for
It is the Unicorn you mourn for.

Or something like that, I suppose.