There are a lot of decisions we must make as voters and the information we have to work with has evolved in directions we never expected—and now there are things we just can't un-hear or un-see.
I just filled out my ballot for the May 16 election, and it was one of the tougher ballots of my life. I’m in a new county (not enjoying it, incidentally—for all its faults, I’m a Multnomah County boy born and bred, and I’m not comfortable out here in Oregon City), and I don’t know the issues nor the candidates. The Voters’ Pamphlet helped a lot. A guy running for School District Director says he’s against Gay Straight Alliance Clubs, fuck him. A gal endorsed by Planned Parenthood? Absolutely gets my vote.
Then I go to my union’s website to see who they’re for and agin, and the ACLU, but in a couple of races I just had to go with who sounded better in their candidate profiles. Like, I went with the guy who said he’d helped install 2000 smoke alarms in mobile home parks over the guy who’s a 20-year officer in the Oregon National Guard.
The ballot measures were easier. Hell, yes, I’ll authorize $44 million for landfill cleanup, improvements to the courthouse and the Oregon Trail Center, redevelopment of downtown, transit tweaks, and environmental mitigation of Clackamas Cove. You wanna raise my taxes a few bucks, and make it easier for ducks to survive? Absofuckinglutely. That’s why we have a goddamn government in the first place.
Build roads, fix bridges, let the homeless ride buses for free, plunk parkspace in the middle of industrial districts, give people free vaccines, clean up pollution, and put an abstract sculpture by a local artist right in front of City Hall. And if you wanna subsidize a drag queen story hour at the local library, I’ll throw another hundred bucks a year at you.
I WANT our kids to have Gay Straight Alliance Clubs, and I WANT our college students to know about Critical Race Theory, and I WANT Fannie Fabulous reading our preschoolers “The Mouse and the Motorcycle.” I want Pride parades, and naked bike rides, and joint Jewish/Muslim bake sales, I want public art and local theater and history lessons about the Klan and Japanese internment and Portland’s neo-Nazi tendencies. I want, basically, what the Constitution lays out in the Preamble:
“Provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”
The sentence before that one is tougher. “Establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility.” I’m not sure we can have both. We just saw a jury levy justice on our twice-impeached, disgraced, insurrectionist former president, and that’s good and right and necessary—but I don’t see domestic tranquility coming from it.
I see a lot of pain and agony coming from it. I see a lot of scared, angry folks with AR-15s and double-lightning-bolt and swastika tattoos, I see a lot of poor people sending ten dollars to trump to pay off his stub-finger-rape liability. I see the judge in this case urging the jurors to maintain their anonymity for their own safety, because recent history shows that trump supporters will attack, maim, and kill with a mispronounced word from his blubbery, Big Mac lips.
And it’s gonna get worse. In two months, trump will be indicted in Georgia for an actual CRIMINAL case. And the DOJ is gonna hit him with criminal charges as well, probably early next year. Every day in trump’s miserable life is going to be worse than the day before it, until he dies, and it is NOT going to be easy for the rest of us, either.
If he was a marginal figure in Fascist politics, we could just ignore him. But a man who grabbed a woman, threw her against the wall in a dressing room, and vulture-clawed her in the vagina, is the Fascist front-runner for the presidential race, and it’s not even close. There have been a few faint bleats of concern from some of the less-fascist fascists in the party today (Romney, Hutchinson, surprisingly Cornyn), but there’s been NO condemnation, no calls to step down, no blowback for being found guilty of sexual assault.
What the weak sisters are worried about is NOT that their standard-bearer is a rapist, but that a rapist might lose the general election next November. THAT’S the problem. They’d much, much rather a non-rapist ran against Joe Biden. But, hell, they’re stuck with the sexual predator, the idiot, the tangerine monster and his army of terrified, heavily-armed FOX drones, and they’re just going to stick their heads in their shells (literally, in the case of the Senate Minority Leader) and hope he just fucking dies before the primaries start. That’s what they have left.
And I’d like to leave you with something I’ve been thinking about since they explained yesterday why the jury didn’t find him liable for rape. And it’s very sexist and piggish of me, but I find it darkly humorous. Ms. Carroll said she wasn’t sure he’d stuck his dick in her, because she couldn’t see.
You got Stormy Daniels out there calling him “Tiny,” and now you’ve got one of his victims not even sure he genitally raped her. She THINKS he did, but she can’t swear to it. And I’ll bet that’s eating him fucking ALIVE right now. I hope it is, anyway. The five million bucks is nothing. The implication that his dick is more seahorse than stallion—that’s priceless.
John Philip Sunseri II is a horror writer from Portland, Oregon. As well as writing traditional horror fiction he also writes Lovecraftian horror. John spent two years at Yale University studying a major in English.
Writing since 2001, John has published over 50 short stories. 2007 saw the release of his first novel, The Spiraling Worm co-written with Australian author David Conyers.
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