On the Eve of (CALL IT ALREADY, KORNACKI, YOU BASTARD) Victory, I'd Like to Say Thanks (Ferret/SC)
My friends, please forgive me, I need to do something a little different tonight.
(Not so different that you can’t find it on me lil’ blog site: http://showercapblog.com/on-the-eve-of-call-it-already-kornacki-you-bastard-victory-id-like-to-say-thanks/)
First of all, I don’t think I could possibly handle reliving this week; it was overwhelming and exhausting the first time ‘round, and besides, there are only so many ways to say, “and then I refreshed the page yet again, my intimacy with the county maps of Pennsylvania and Georgia growing so deep the disembodied outlines of Gwinnett and Allegheny haunted me in my fleeting moments of sleep.”
(Also, I drank a great deal, and feel certain I missed a detail or two. Last I remember, the Cubs won the World Series, and somebody found some e-mails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop...did I miss anything?)
Just to get the bare minimum level of chroniclin’ out of the way so the boss doesn’t ride my ass, yes, Tangerine Idi Amin, as expected, delivered his horrifyingly fascistic yet amusingly low-energy little speech, rejecting reality and democracy once and for all, inciting his shitbag cult to some rather frightening public displays which I pray don’t escalate any further.
But it doesn’t feel nearly so dangerous anymore; we all know a broken man when we see one. Y’know, for a career criminal who (ghost) wrote the book on one-way loyalty, somehow the dumb shit has been caught completely off guard by this heaping spoonful of his own medicine, administered by Mitch McConnell without even the courtesy of soothing airplane noises. Dolt.
Anyway.
I started tinkering with this post Tuesday night, when we were still a bit shellshocked by the unexpected composition of the electorate; when we learned the pollsters had once again failed to detect the seemingly infinite waves of the MAGA horde, like we were trapped in an old Gauntlet cabinet with more of the little fuckers than the stack of quarters mom gave us could hope to cope with; when the visions of sugarplum fairies and expanded courts dissipated, and American monsters seemed to lurk in every shadow.
I understand that to a great extent that emotional moment has passed, as we’ve watched the Biden/Harris landslide accumulate, vote by excruciating vote. We deserve our weekend of celebration and release; I personally plan on devoting most of my Sunday to just exhaling, possibly for 3-4 hours at a stretch.
Anyway, I don’t want to spend this moment wallowing in the filth of Trump and Trumpism, there’s plenty of that waiting for us in the days ahead, as a White House full of cornered rats chew through one another’s very flesh, desperately seeking exits that no longer exist. And of course one wants to block out adequate time to fully appreciate the splendor of the Dobbses and the Hannitys in decline, the tantrums they throw as reality’s grim hammer smashes their precious marionette to pieces. Certainly whichever streaming service offers me the best seat to observe Steve Bannon’s ongoing downfall has earned my subscription money.
Time for all that soon enough. Like I said, I’d like to do something a little different tonight.
I’d like to talk about you.
It’s been a tricky week to navigate emotionally, but you’ve absorbed Tuesday’s House and Senate disappointments by now and you’re ready for the new fight in Georgia. You’ve learned how to do that over the last four years, haven’t you? How to do take punch after punch, and periodically a sledgehammer, and just keep on coming.
We’ve all had to. The bastards’ plan, and I guess you have to give them credit for sticking to it, was to pelt us with shit every hour of every day until we broke down, but we didn’t break down. We took it, all of it, for four years, and we didn’t look away and we held each other up and we found, each of us in our own way, the ability to give as much as we had to give.
And it was enough.
It was just enough, actually.
Because holy shit, the hydra had a few more heads than we were expecting. More fucking heads than even Rasmussen dared to conjure. And a coalition we thought would frolic to a landslide turned out to be juuuuust big enough to deliver the map-changing statement win the nation needed.
Like 2016, the margin for error was narrower than we understood. Unlike 2016, we never took our eye off the ball, we worked every day like we were ten points behind, and this time, even the last-minute appearance of millions of surprise scumbags wasn’t enough to defeat us.
Which is why the pundits mocking the millions of dollars we sent to long shot campaigns like Amy McGrath’s and Jamie Harrison’s are so wrong. They’d have you believe that was folly. It wasn’t. It was hope.
Hope was not always easy to come by, with a President regularly inciting terrorism from the Oval Office, but you didn’t lose hope, did you? Okay, you did, once or twice, we all did, but when you needed a few days to put your head and your heart back together, somebody picked up the slack for you, and you returned the favor in time.
And yes, we hoped the voters of even the reddest states would see the stark disparity between what the two parties were offering this year and make better choices. That hope built this coalition, the largest in American history, and tonight I’m honestly kind of in awe at how that coalition turned out to be barely, but exactly what we needed to win.
Just enough young people were inspired to show up. Just enough NeverTrump Republicans put party over country. Just enough women and non-white voters turned out, and you have to believe that has something to do with the long overdue diversification of the party’s elected officials, particularly our talented and inspiring Blue Wave freshmen class.
And if we hadn’t won the Blue Wall state governments in the midterms, if it was loyal Trump stooges administering these elections and counting these ballots right now, could we trust the results to be the same? Remember how much work we did in 2018? Turns out it was worth it; we needed every bit of it.
I think we’ve learned the arc of history doesn’t bend towards justice on its own; it takes serious elbow grease to wrestle that fucker into place. It truly appears as though we needed every single drop of sweat from every single one of us, 75 million Americans giving everything they had to give, as one, together, to win this fight.
And from where I’m sitting, that means we couldn’t have pulled any of this off without your work, YOU, reading this right now. Without that Saturday afternoon you spent text banking, that cousin you talked into registering to vote for the very first time, that $5 donation you sent to a candidate in a district you’ve never once set foot in, Donald Trump might have ridden a wave of hate to a mandate to end all the best things about this country.
For the rest of my life, I’ll feel a chill down my spine, thinking about what that second term would have meant, with all the babysitters replaced by willing collaborators. This was no longer the Adam Sandler/Kevin James crew of bungling dipshits who couldn’t find the light switches; they’d figured out what they wanted to break and where the weak points were. Shit, they tried to destroy the entire fucking US Postal Service on a desperate whim, just to steal away our sacred right to fire them for their failings.
And whatever evil shit Bill Barr was cooking up in the dark corners of his fascist imagination...let me just say I’m thankful we won’t be shelving that particular book in the non-fiction section.
Because we beat the twisted fucks! And I truly believe, however great or small your contribution to the fight, we wouldn’t have won without you. And I hope that exorcises any lingering ghosts of 2016 for you, and I hope that in those long dark nights that come to us all from time to time, you remember the work you did when it mattered most, and the memory of it brings you peace. You deserve that. You earned it.
Anyway. Thanks for listening to me yammer on like this, we’ll get back to poo jokes next week. In the meantime, let’s get to work whoopin’ a couple of Georgia grifters’ asses, huh? Let’s reunite some families!
(Ok, for now let’s keep on waiting for the damn election to get called. I really thought it would’ve happened by the time I was done. Yeesh.)
= new reply since forum marked as read
-Laelth
Your post is fantastic! You got to the heart of the matter and laid it all out so plainly so we could all see.
Well done! We couldn't have gotten through this mess without YOU.
its been a tough 4 years, thanks for being here to explain it all.
Now it looks like he’ll have to do it on the weekend.
No matter, though. I will be overjoyed when we win. And I will leave some negative feedback for the networks.
Thank you.
I've been checking it every three milliseconds since Tuesday morning. 
Please, accept my deepest apologies for the magnitude of the bumps and horrors you've seen as we transition. Yes, I agree, it's very much like riding one of Willy Wonka's contraptions. The Vectorizor is a crude mechanism cobbled together out of desperation and good intentions. I mean, what was I thinking when I built it to use mail-in-ballots as the device's motive power? My original plan was to use pixie dust and unicorn dung. However, I couldn't find any fresh enough.
One thing for which I will never apologize and will never find a means of repaying or expressing my gratitude is that you came through with the required one-person one-votes to push it over the threshold between Trumpanzeegon and Bidenolian Space. Man, did you! I never in my wildest dreams even began to anticipate it and I'm amazed some of the over 200 year old components of this bailing wire and duct taped gizmo could withstand the onslaught. Thanks so much. You are my light.
I've made a note to myself in future projects to include a Keepen Der Tiny und Inadequaten Gerfingers outter Das Gerspringenworken module on future do-dads I build. That, should have been obvious from the get go.
Thanks again for everything Shower Cap. We all deserve some measure of rest, when allowed. Until then we must do as Katy Tur intends to do and sleep when we're dead or the Tangeranus is no longer visible in the rear view mirror of history.
When it comes to that point, I'm going to need a moment to re-calibrate to the new dimension in solitude and deep contemplation. Regaining my respect for those who've earned it and blotting those who've abused my good will from my awareness.
Tah for now! I look forward to seeing what new and improved TheFerret has to say about where we find ourselves in a few months.
