If You Think You Know How This Ends, You Haven't Been Paying Attention

The only thing we can predict about this election is that we cannot predict goddamned thing about this election--and we cannot forget that now

Hey, funny story, remember a week ago when I said not to give up because it’s impossible to predict what happens next in any situation that involves the ancient and crumbling semi-sentient lich-boil Donald Trump?

Please believe me when I say: you STILL CAN’T

Two weeks after that slowly-broiling bag of walrus-drool and noted shadow over Innsmouth slightly turned his head, then posed for his little Monroeville Mall Glamour Shot, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE, NOT EVEN REPUBLICANS, GIVES EVEN THE SADDEST AND MOST PEBBLY OF SHITS ABOUT A FULL-ON ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT.

It’s genuinely impressive how holistically Trump and his semi-leashed trained RNC have rake-faced their entire response to a shooting that should have sealed the election for anyone even remotely normal. It is gone from the headlines, and frankly, already was before Biden’s grand gesture and the bonkers twists and turns of the last four days.

You know, the way this Substack usually works is that I post a public essay, and then a follow-up piece under the paywall, featuring a great deal of yelling I wanted to include in the original but about which didn’t want to deal with a bunch of bad-faith screaming in the comments.

I have two separate 2500 word chunks of almost finished follow-ups to Keep Calm and F***ing Stop This S*** that I have to delete because SO MUCH KEEPS HAPPENING that 72 hours later the first one was wildly out of date, and 24 hours after that, the second one was totally irrelevant as well.

It’s fun to be right. It’s definitely way more fun to be about things not being quite so dark as they seemed…right up until Sunday afternoon, when I was not right at all.

The first follow-up that will now die in drafts concerned what an acidically horrendous idea I thought it was for Biden to drop out, how dangerous, boneheaded, as bot-infested as a Wesley Crusher science project and as astroturfed as a fucking stadium the whole movement looked, and how frightened I was that it might actually happen.

And when literally everyone I’ve ever met started texting me to tell me the breaking news with which a gatling-gun of shrieking ALLCAPS ENDTIMES alerts had already choked my phone into quivering submission, I was genuinely horrified. I deleted all the social media apps, turned on airplane mode, and locked my phone in a fucking drawer because I knew I simply could not take it right that second. The utter fear for the future. The panic for my very young child. My own cynical pessimism so tenderly nurtured and grown by the constant shamefaced Eeyoring defeatism and infighting of my own party, even in the face of the oncoming fucking sandworm of this smirking, shoddy-ass Goon: Messiah, the ICE must flow, shambling Mad Libs: Oops! All Racial Slurs highly-absorbent diaper-elemental American gom jabbar of a community-theater fascism reboot.

I headed straight for the bar and parked my open mouth under the tap because the last eight years have training-montaged me into assuming crash position any time the Democrats make an active strategic move. The problem was, it had to be Harris. We could not stand up and look the country in the eye with a straight face and tell the truth, that the Republicans are a life-threatening disease in our democracy, while elevating any other candidate. Harris is the only possibility anyone cast a vote for in the primary. She is who we voted for to replace Biden if he could not serve. Anyone else would be a smoky backroom deal to circumvent the primary process, as unofficial and technically unnecessary as that process may be.

And I just couldn’t. It’s been too long since 2016, and too much. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t believe that the entirety of the Democratic Party, a big tent bursting at the seams with a clown car of loosely-aligned individuals with their own aspirations and goals, plus a shit-ton of craven grifters, firebrands and cowards, Beltway boyars, and an even shittier ton of non-Party members who have worked far harder to nailbat that organization than they ever have to speak the softest tsk-tsking of conservatives, would rally around a woman of color. A woman of color the left has hated like hellfire and incremental policy changes for the crime of daring to Run Without Being Bernie, and whose name the center has barely bothered to pronounce correctly more than twice in a row. America has gotten so much more radioactively, venomously misogynistic in these last eight years, so much more openly white supremacist, so much less ashamed of its worst instincts and suspicions, I truly believed this nation would enthusiastically choose fascism over a woman. Again.

And then. And then it started. The endorsements, the donations, the support. The bloody coconut memes. The energy. The impotent Looney Tunes rage of the GOP as their convention, their button-eyed Other Brother of a VP candidate, their arrogance, fell apart to the point of barely managing to choke out a flaccid her laugh is stupid and she’s stupid splutter days later. People finally being able to admit that Biden was a good President and give him at least some shriveled dried-up version of his flowers. The youth interest and positivity. The joy the online world, which had basically forgotten how to say anything nice to or about anyone, fucking Care Bear Stared into the void for Kamala.

Oh, god. Everything felt so much worse.

Don’t do that. Don’t give me hope.

What the fuck am I supposed to do with hope? Hope? Fucking gross. I can’t afford that shit. It’s the hope that kills you! Like, ALWAYS. Graphically. Explosively. I barely remember what hope feels like. I think the last time I felt it was when we were dancing in the streets because Biden had won. Even on my little Maine island, dancing in the streets, kids, grandparents, so many of us. I don’t want to hope. For the length and breadth of my entire political life, every time I think I’m as cynical and jaded as I possibly can be, America finds a tiny little ember of stupid sunny Disney princess bluebird-alighting optimism deep down inside me and then strangles the fucking life out of her. I’m used to grim white-knuckled bracing for whatever comes. Hope feels like a dress that’s too big for me now. It hangs funny. It’s not fashionable anymore. It gapes and billows in weird places that show too much for public wear.

But what the hell. I got a lot of belts and a sewing kit.

(By the way, if you want to make fun of me for feeling so strongly about all of this, you can very kindly, gently, and lovingly, go insert a plastic glove between the cushions of your favoritecouch and fuck it all the way to whatever reeking golfball-gargling techfrathell JD Vance’s sugar-free Edgar-suit crawled out of. If people you know and respect are afraid for their lives and their futures there is a reason. We were supposed to have gotten over ew it’s so lame to care about literally anything when it became so crystal clear that pretending to be too cool to care about things meant it was easy to take those things away.)

Here’s the thing, though. It all feels possible right now because it’s early days. Momentum hasn’t been with the Dems in some time, and it’s heady stuff.

But we still don’t know how this is going to turn out.

No more than Trump’s shooting made victory inevitable, Kamala’s rise does not cinch this. A week ago, all that Let’s Go Brandon merchandise had, you know, any kind of meaning at all. Next week, neither I nor anyone else with a crumb of honesty left can tell you what the situation on the ground will be.

It’s STILL impossible to predict what’s going to happen next.

The media and the GOP and most of the internet were screaming for Biden to bow out, but it’s pretty clear that either they didn’t actually expect him to do it, or that he wouldn’t do it until it was too late, instead of the cinematically perfect timing that obliterated the RNC, assassination attempt, VP pick, and everything else from the public Give-a-Shit-O-Meter. Or they assumed, as I did, a nasty battle royale of cutthroat saints and ghouls slugging it out at the open convention every pundit goes to sleep praying for, an orgy of backstabbing and bloodslinging that would leave any eventual victor both too damaged for voters to embrace and drowning in too much residual resentment from their peers and their peers’ fanbases (ugh, I will never not loathe that “fanbase” has become a word commonly and worse, correctly, applied to politicians’ supporters) to rally a real coalition in November.

It’s never Joever

That salivating carrion-bird, mostly right-wing billionaire-controlled media hasn’t gone anywhere. That Hungry Hungry Nazis free-for-all GOP even the New York Times is bafflingly running cover for hasn’t either. They’re in disarray right now because they weren’t prepared to go against a popular Harris, but I promise you, the talking points will come, and when they do, they will be the nastiest centipede-brained notes from that Event Horizon gore dimension you have ever heard. they don’t have time to give her the full Hillary, so what they dish out in the next hundred days is going to be some seriously pustulant, concentrated shit.

The GOP will be supported in every drop of wild-eyed spacebat bile they spew by an army of bots fueled by the Thousand Dark and Writhing Young of the Black Goat of the Internet, Chat GPT, conjoined at the heart with a complicit media and online commentariat that desperately wants its Trump years back.

It will not just be the right. The Copmala memes will resurface, the accusations of sleeping her way to the top will even be trumpeted by women who should know better, and while neither those nor any of the old 2020 mudslinging was actually true within proper context, and none of it, especially calling her a cop, is going to freak the normies the way the online left thinks it will, the campaign will have to have better answers to them than they had the last time round.

And it will not just be things that actually happened with a different context than is useful to a political culture in which the first to make the accusation reaps the rewards. There will be pure lies that make the rounds faster than the truth can tepidly whisper a retraction on page 9. There will be conspiracies and fucking Black Lady Space Lasers and clones and blood-drinking demons and a mountain of bullshit shoveled faster and more furiously than it ever has been, because they have that little time to make it all stick. And every grain of sand will erode some of the amazing support and goodwill giving us all a light to look up to right now.

Then there will be the debate, which will happen at least once. And while I see everyone chortling with glee over seeing a prosecutor disasemble a felon on live television, I’m not so sure it will go that way. She was good but not great in the primary debates, though those are different creatures. But Hillary won her debates while the Biff Tannen you get from Wish.com babooned around behind her and admitted to crimes live on stage and it never mattered whatsoever.

As usual, as always, all Trump has to do is not shit out of his mouth directly onto the moderator (over the shoulder is fine) to be hailed as a winner by the media. While Harris, as usual, as always, will have to be perfection personified. She has to present coherent policy that satisfies every corner of a Democratic coalition that must now include literally everyone who isn’t ready to be a cartoon Nazi, but she can’t be boring or stiff or use any nuance or big words or she’s a charisma-free schoolmarm. She has to attack Trump with both clever memeable zingers and devastating statements of the facts of his malfeasance—but she can’t be too angry or she’s a sooper skary angry black woman whose “only platform is not being Trump.” She can’t be shrill, but it really doesn’t matter what she says, every woman who says something a man doesn’t like is shrill to that guy. She has to defend both Biden’s administration and separate herself from it, have the perfect answer to every question, never let Trump yell over her but never yell over him, and look both beautiful doing it and also not too beautiful because WE LIVE IN A GARBAGE PLACE FULL OF GARBAGE AND THAT GARBAGE IS ON FIRE.

Her VP pick will also have to be perfect. Everything will have to be perfect—or this big blue Care Bear Stare will have to hold the line when its inevitably not and Democrats are fucking terrible at doing that. Especially when asked to unify around a woman, let alone a woman of color from California. Part of the reason for the sound and fury on the right is that Dems almost never stop taking a sledgehammer to their own knees long enough to unify like this. No one knows how to deal with it. Everyone expects it to fall apart because it usually does. And it may yet.

Then there are the events that are too frequent now to call Black Swan Events. The things we can’t predict, like a conservative incel trying to take down his own guy. I can’t tell you what any of those will be, but I can tell you at least one is coming. It will be bad. Overseas or at home. Putin, Iran, Netanyahu; Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, the list of foreign despots and homegrown oligarchs who want their sweet baby Trump back so he can sleep through their dances of death and money goes on and on and they won’t be idle for long. Whatever the October surprise is will likely not be as clearly stupid as Hunter Biden’s laptop. (And don’t worry, they may call her childless now, but they will go after her stepkids and anyone else they think is vulnerable.)

Drums. Drums in the deep.

And there’s the plain old revolting, ancient misogyny and racism that will be an issue when all those Americans who will look you in the eye and tell you they don’t see color or gender actually get into the booth. Lift up any rock )or any comments section) and it’s always there. The laugh thing seems pathetic now, but there may well be just enough time to get just enough people to sing their old song: I don’t know, she’s just not likeable.

We have to put in the work, and we have to be prepared to maintain this unity in the face of a political ecosystem that’s extremely favorable to conservatives on every level. And then, if that unity does hold up to unreal stress-testing? They are planning to and will try to cheat and steal this country out from under those of us who just want to go about our goddamned lives any way they can—which is not me being paranoid, it’s what they have said out loud every day since January 6th and put in preliminary work to accomplish with statehouses and courthouses.

I hope we’re ready.

I am still so worried. I am still so afraid. She’s a good fucking candidate. But that’s rarely the real problem.

But hey. I don’t know. I’ve honestly never seen anything quite like the joyful embracing of Kamala Harris’s nomination these last few days. Not even in 08. Maybe we won’t throw her to the wolves the way so many before her have been summarily tossed. Maybe a loud, bright, unembarrassed laugh can drown out a scream of hate.

I was so wrong about Biden dropping out. I was wrong about people’s willingness to rally around Harris. Maybe I’m wrong about the worst of my fears. Maybe there’s a reason to…well.

Fucking hell I want to be wrong. Please make me wrong, America.

I’ll conclude this week’s sermon with a parable.

I don’t think many people know that a “biden” is a type of flower. A rather pretty one, but not terribly showy or fancy. It won’t be the main star of any grand arrangements. You won’t win a prize at a fair for even the best of them. They’re just quite nice little things.

I had a few in my garden this year. And to be honest, they’re not doing very well. It’s been too hot; they got pretty fried in July. And to be honest, I didn’t do a great job watering them. I was so busy with so many things. I didn’t pay enough attention. I didn’t notice them drooping. They didn’t scream out for attention the way thirsty roses or snapdragons did.

But they’re not gone yet. They’re still pretty green. A few blossoms left. There’s one particularly huge, sunny one I’m working hard to save.

This is a biden. Don’t forget their lesson: Nothing grows without care.

And you know, right next to them, there’s this crazy coconut tree that suddenly sprang up out of nowhere a few days ago, and it’s growing every single day.

Make America Laugh Again.