I was trained as a worst-case analyst of military capabilities and human nature. Accordingly, I knew things were going to get worse. Sure enough, they have.
I have veered over into denial over the performance of the Tigers. They got body-slammed by the Giants again last night, and are going back to Detroit two games in the hole. To avoid depression, I was actually looking morbidly at the poll numbers this morning and the antics of the candidates on the campaign trail. Sorry, I could not resist. There are some great stories out there as the rhetoric races to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
I won’t dignify any of it by citation. There are less than a dozen days until we will no longer listen to all this- well, let’s call it what one of the candidates does: bullshit. I have noticed one interesting and positive indication: Michele Obama and her husband and that guy from Michigan or Massachusetts or wherever are no longer peering at me intently from the right-hand ad banner that AOL has inserted into my email.
It is quite liberating. I think that means that the campaigns have already decided the Virginia vote, and we are no longer a “battleground state” and they have decided to leave us alone. That is a curious thing, since there are big things still in play that could impact Election Day and Halloween.
The difference between the two holidays is as razor thin as they are telling us the election will be. In the case of the former holiday, we get to vote between two candidates who are pretending to be something they are not, and in the latter, we all get to pretend we are all someone else and everything is just fine.
It is too late to find anything substantive to argue about, and I won’t attempt to bullshit you on that. I am nervous. I will accept that no one is talking about Sequestration, since that is not a matter over which the President, whoever it might be, has any direct control. The Office of Management and Budget has responsibility for implementing what the Congress has mandated- and apparently they are not talking about what the massive whack to the budget is going to do. No one else is, either, so it could be a perfect storm of activity in the Lame Duck Congress that comes back after the election.
Those would be the same Bozos who legislated the thing to begin with, by the way, so why we would expect them to do anything courageous is quite beyond me.
Neither of the candidates is saying anything about Global Warming or Climate Change or whatever the term of art might be this morning. I have a grim fascination with that, since Hurricane Sandy is headed this way.
Weather is not climate, as we have been told by some, or this is the Crack of Doom according to others. But the issue clearly has not been selling very well to an electorate clearly preoccupied with other matters.
I have decided to buy into the hype about the storm. Weather has become show business these days, and the eponymously-named Channel is filled with news of apprehension and dread. We are still smarting over the savage Deracho wind event that knocked the nation’s capital off the grid for a week this last Spring, and I am prepared to believe that this could be bad.
The matter at hand is Hurricane Sandy, which weakened to a category 1 hurricane last night, after raking itself along the island of Cuba, killing nearly a dozen people on the eastern end of the island, and dumping rain on the detainees in Guantanamo.
Sandy is not the most deadly storm to hit Cuba in recent memory. That renown goes to cat-5 Hurricane Dennis in the summer of 2005. Out problem is the course of the jet stream and an early-winter cold front headed east. That system could slam into the vast moisture-laden corpus of Sandy’s stately progress to the north over the next few days. Some of the storm tracks have the storm cutting to the left right over the Potomac. Others have New York in the cross hairs.
Either one is going to get us wet. The question is whether our roofs will stay on.
Unlike the Deracho event, the power companies have a chance to prepare for this, and crews are being placed on alert as far away as Michigan and Ohio. Preparations are good, and I would hate for the power to be out all across the Northeast on Election Day.
Worse, I would hate to miss Halloween. Tracy O’Grady’s Willow is going to feature fortune-tellers and costume-themed prizes for the evening. I have not figured out the right costume yet, but a fisherman’s oil slicker, hip boots and a Sou’Wester might be just the thing.
I don’t know about perfect storms, like the political ones in 2008 and 2010, but I am prepared to believe that this one could go right beyond weather and straight to metaphor.
And that event, my friends, is why storm preparation is the key. Avoid literary devices. Lay in a stock of TP, eggs and milk just like the people on the Weather Channel recommend. And vote early.
Why wait?
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com