Tick tick tick. 22 days to go. Until. We find out. Just how. Fucked up. The USA is. I mean, it already is fucked up. It has been fucked up for decades. In my humble opinion, the last time the USA wasn’t terribly fucked up was shortly after WWII. We came out of that global nightmare that cost roughly 75,000,000 lives as a world saved from fascism. Here in the U.S. there came a period of calm and a fairly good standard of living. Blue collar manufacturing and white collar jobs paid a living wage. Even during eight years of a Republican administration in the 1950s it didn’t matter. As one Life Magazine cover story stated back then the U.S. was a nation on roller skates. Drive-in theaters and Hula Hoops were a thing. People raising a family could justifiably feel their tike’s futures were looking bright. That sense of security, safety, peace and prosperity were more than abstractions or wishful thinking.

Then came the 1960s. Some of those “tikes” went off to college. Once there some of them rejected the seeming bourgeois values that the above noted prosperity conferred. Signs of inequality and persecution became visible. Roller skates were tossed off for rolling a joint. Dropping out was in IN. Hula Hoops became hallucinatory drug gyrations. Why not?, they seemed to be saying. Reality was a bit too much for many. The Bomb had been released from Genie’s nuclear lantern, never to be able to ever get it back in. By the end of the 60s decade, JFK, Malcolm X, MLK and RFK  had all been assassinated. A military draft was in effect. Vietnam was a body bag black eye due to the Commie Boogieman having been conveniently created. Jim Crow was being documented for its vicious racism. Civil rights became a street fight. Women indignantly picked their fight and showed feminine might. Protests, sit-ins, and a national Democrat Convention became a police riot in Chicago. The decade ended with the Manson family and the Tate-LaBianca brutal murders. A very unstable decade.

Then came the real 70sShow: Nixon. Then Watergate. then no Nixon. Then an assassination attempt on President Ford. Iran took hostages at the American embassy there, making Jimmy Carter a one-term President. Now comes Reagan and an assassination attempt on him. (Are you sensing a bit of deja vu here yet?).  Are you wondering what this posting has to do with that first sentence up there, the one that invokes only 22 days until we find out…?

Hey, I just figured a little bit of historical review was in order, giving props to a period in the USA when things were a lot better–at least as far as a superficial assessment of the 1950s goes. And skipping Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump and now Biden and Harris..

Well, skipping all of them as far as what now confronts a nation that is likely campaign-fatigued and welcoming a resolution to all the political rhetoric and rancor that has been the norm for the past several major election cycles. Just 22 more says of this sickening charade of a real democracy. One candidate is a convicted felon (X34) and a convicted (civil trial) sexual molester. Oh, right. And the same candidate undisputably tried to overthrow the government when he lost his re-election bid. But same said candidate has not been arrested for ANY of the convictions or being an insurrectionist. Go figure. Or don’t bother. Clearly, this candidate is Teflon coated. It defies logic. It also is an indictment of the supposedly “opposition” party. The Teflon candidate is free as a result of the current “opposition” party’s Attorney General not doing his job: upholding the rule of law. Clearly! And Teflon’s opponent was the Attorney General for California once upon a time. Which begs the question: if she gets elected, will she have him arrested and tossed in the slammer, where he should be right now? I, for one, doubt it. She is a very weak candidate. She implicitly and sometimes explicitly regurgitates her party’s 21st Century lurching evermore to the Right, the worst of which is a pro-Pentagon, pro military industrial complex mentality, and the ever worse worst of all a pro-Zionist agenda that has US taxpayer dollars paying for weapons sent to a foreign military that uses them to bomb a largely civilian population, including their schools, hospitals, shelters, places of worship and supply depots. Teflon Man or Genocide Gal. What a choice!

But wait. Hold on. Are you sitting down? There are more than these two hideous cartoon characters running for President. Seriously. I am not making this up. But many might think I am. Say what? Who would that be? Never heard of this person. But SHE is real! However, and again, it is the so-called (laughably, at this point) opposition party that has gone out of its way to undermine the most well-known third-party option. This very real but very under-reported other choice seeks to remedy a glaring foreign policy that supports death and destruction, along with domestic social and economic injustice and tackle the existential threat posed by climate change that her opponents gloss over. Those who support this valuable alternative to the evil of two lessors election cling to the hope of even a remote chance of a stunning upset. Unlikely. The System (and it includes the two major political parties, and most critically it includes ALL of the mainstream, and even much of the non-mainstream “news” organizations) is in place to prevent such an unwelcome intrusion into the exclusive Members Only Club of Donkey or Elephant sycophants and acolytes. In other words, the fix is in folks. Those not having wakened up to this repulsive reality will get the government they deserve, that is certain. Those who have awakened to this rigged manner of faking that they actually have any choice at all might at least see a surprise final total owing to their eyes-wide-open activism.

Tick tick tick. 22 days away. Oh for those good ol’ days of roller skating and Hula Hooping and making out in the back seat of the Chevy at the drive-in movie theaters. If not that, then whatever gets you through the night. In the immortal words of Mick Jagger you can’t always get what you want, but you might just get what you need.