by Chris James
At a recent local Republican Club dinner, the invited speaker asked the audience who was going to vote for Trump. Within my immediate field of vision, a few hands went up. The speaker then asked who was not going to vote for Trump. My hand shot up assertively toward the Home Depot inspired ceiling of the cathedral-like building in which we were being entertained. Within my limited panorama, only one other hand went up. I also noticed an outbreak of swiveling of heads, glaring at the malcontent in their midst (me). But the most obvious feature of this nearby population was that about half of them failed to raise their hands in answer to either of the speaker's questions. Aha! What have we here? An epidemic of undecideds? A scaredy-cat box of chickens? Or, worse, a closet full of wannabe Hillarians?
The speaker, having craftily singled out the smaller, defenseless
non-Trump contingent, then hit it with both barrels. Namely, the well-worn,
shame-on-you, double cliché of 1) abstaining from Trump is a vote for Hillary,
and 2) vote Trump for the sake of your children and grandchildren. I get this a
lot. Friends, colleagues, my wife, and our outspoken best friend of 53 years. I
don't argue with them that I'm right, nor that they are wrong. But my using the
"voting one's conscience" and "free speech" defense just
doesn't seem to hack it. So I decided to clinically analyze the speaker's
claims on a Science 101 basis---not to change anybody's mind, but to shine a
little reality light on his glib utterances.
Putting 1) under the microscope begins with the electoral ballot.
Next to the candidates' names is a little oval. If you fill in that oval with
your pen or pencil (please try to stay inside the lines), then this action on
your part is called a vote for the candidate in question. Leaving the oval
empty establishes the fact that you are not voting for that candidate. In a two
person contest, leaving both ovals empty means that you have given your vote to
neither candidate. This is called a tie. Therefore, in the Trump/Hillary case,
it is abundantly clear---even to the most dingy of bats---that a tie means that
no vote will ever be given by me to Hillary; a resounding NO that deservedly
left her ballot oval pure, virgin and unsullied.
For the still unmoved doubters, I would like to take a different
approach by invoking an incontrovertible truth based on the speaker's own
tortured logic. He claims that not voting for Trump is a vote for Hillary.
Since there is no conceivable way that I will ever be voting for Hillary, then
the reverse of his claim applies. Using the speaker's own golden rule, a
non-vote for Hillary is therefore a vote for Trump. I rest my case.
Obviously, by not coloring Trump's little oval, I reduced his
chances by one vote. If Trump loses the presidency by one vote, I will plead
guilty and submit to the guillotine. My sense is that if other abstainers adopt
the same honorable stance, then alphabetically, there will be a long line ahead
of me and I will be keeping my head for many months, perhaps years, to come.
A sidebar: Obviously, my voting decision wasn't distilled from the
kind of facile, cynical analysis outlined above. It resulted from a multitude
of intellectual and visceral ssessments, most of them hopelessly negative and
too numerous to list here. So, in case I was asked, I tried to come up with a
short snappy summary of what it all boiled down to, and, metaphorically
speaking, I came down to this: I was presented with a choice between a)
President Trump, throwing a Junior High tantrum over something or somebody that
got up his nose, hits the nuclear button in high dudgeon in order to "show
them a thing or two" and to "make America even greater," and b)
Madam President, with the wide-eyed innocent "Oh! Was that the nuclear
button? What a silly girl I am. But I didn't intend to push it. Really. I
thought it was the remote."
And how about the speaker's other exhortation (statement 2,
above)? It's useless. It doesn't work. This is no wild, thoughtless claim. It
is based on solid, muscular history. Thus, our parents and grandparents laid
the groundwork for our future during a simpler, "less-advanced" age.
Yet look how we ended up today---despite whatever political efforts our
ancestors made for the sake of us. Nationally, the U.S. is trapped in a bewildering
socio-political maelstrom. Internationally, we are becoming a laughing-stock.
That would be a damning label for any country, but for the world's super-power?
Outrageous.
In today's politically moribund, self-absorbed,
technology-obsessed age, does the invited speaker seriously believe that we
will be any more successful at implementing his naive wishful thinking than our
forebears were? We are currently living in an era when the lunatics are
unmistakably running the asylum. As a result, it is virtually impossible to
deal with management on any intelligent level. But if folks want to go ahead
and try---with the current presidential candidacy as their focus---then, if I
were a texter, I would text them one word of encouragement: "goluwit."
Good Luck With That.
