You’ll Just Die: I Can Walk and Chew Gum at the Same Time!

A friend whom I’ll call Larry was first chastised, then denounced, then told “I want nothing more to do with you” on Facebook for the crime of posting a critical fact about Joe Biden last week.

Here’s why some of us are not going along with the curiously widespread notion that we must suspend our use of reason for the next six months. Believe it or not, tying ourselves to chairs with muzzles placed over our mouths is actually not necessary. Even more shocking news flash: it won’t help defeat Trump in the next election.

Ordering us to do so is not only offensive, but also says tons about the politics of these Democrat-worshiping bullies. In the counter-factual world of Bernie as the nominee, would any of these self-righteous hall monitors restrain themselves about his shortcomings or adopt a monkish silence? On the contrary, they would be screaming from the rooftops about how Sanders MUST move to the right to capture all those wary voters who want to keep paying their health insurance premiums and think Israeli annexation of other people’s land is just the thing.

No, they would never accept an imposed vow of silence for themselves but now puff up in holiness to remind us unruly schoolchildren that there is ONE GOAL that must occupy our collective mind and spirit, which is to send the Evil One packing. Suggesting that Biden is not the ideal standard-bearer to lead us into battle is thus both sacrilege and sedition.

I suspect that a very ample majority, close to 100 percent in fact, of people who post political news of a leftish tendency will pull the lever for stumbling and incoherent Joe, unless they live in a state like mine where it won’t matter, in which case WTF are you talking about? I’m pretty sure Larry is aware of the dangers to peace, the planet, and our polity represented by the raging nut job in the White House.

However, neither Larry nor I plan to go into hibernation for the rest of 2020 and in fact have a few ideas about how to contribute to reversing the dangerous trends accelerated—but hardly invented—by DJT. Oddly, or not, what Mr Biden will actually do after January 2021 never seems to enter the conversation. Why not?

Why is all this finger-wagging about what we must, haveta, gotta do when voting occurs 161 days from now so annoyingly short-sighted? Because it implies and sometimes explicitly states that All Will Be Well once we effect a change of occupancy in a building on Pennsylvania Avenue. It accuses skeptics of the heretical belief that something deeper than one individual’s strange sociopathology is bringing us woe. It demands the right to go back to sleep.

Most importantly of all, it demands passivity from now until November.

To take just one example: those of us who actively campaigned for an end to the insurance company death panels standing between us and medical care have a major problem with Joe B. While an ample majority of the country agrees that Wall Street has no business in the provision of healthcare, Biden is beholden to his greedy backers in the rentier class who don’t want to give up their gold-bearing goose. He’s quite explicit about it, assuring one and all that nothing will change, despite the new, pandemic-stimulated attention to the dysfunctional current system. Biden, like Trump, has no interest in a radical overhaul, and Biden, like Trump, lines up with the 1 percenters who are profiting handily while people die and go bankrupt.

Does that make Biden just as bad as Trump? Does that mean it’s irrelevant who wins in November? Actually, some of us are capable of holding two thoughts in our minds simultaneously: Trump is awful, and healthcare delivery has to be changed. Imagine that. And no, we should most definitely NOT keep quiet about it.

But pointing out the alignment of the Democrat mainstream with corporate greed will dissuade low-information voters from hoofing it over to the polls later this year, right? If so, those who decided that Biden was our guy better do something about it other than demanding that the rest of us STFU. Sounds like you have some persuading to do, so perhaps start by communicating with the Biden campaign that he’d better start making more attractive promises instead of announcing that his goal is to turn back the clock to the Obama-normal era.

And incidentally, telling Larry and me to clam up isn’t likely to inhibit the Trump campaign from saying a lot of nasty things about Biden, like for example, how closely tied he is to the Wall Street elite that’s ruining people’s lives. Is that hypocritical gaslighting? Yes. And? Trump ran to the left against Hillary in many policy areas, and Biden has the same vulnerability. Why not repeat a winning strategy?

Biden is a disastrous choice, but the Dem machine made it and now has to live with it. Those who went with the more-of-the-same wing are saddled with a glaringly weak figure who may well win by default because the other guy’s Oz curtain finally has been shredded. A government led by a President Biden will face grave crises on multiple fronts, and he’d better improve on his past record if he doesn’t plan to pave the way for the next Trump, an equally reactionary post-Trumpian figure who will be less deranged and thus more dangerous, knowing as he/she/they will, just how far the American people will line up behind a demagogue.

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