Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt Labatts,
I don’t want to vote for anybody for president this year, and everybody keeps yelling at me. Well, not everybody. The Hillary people don’t seem to care whether or not I vote. It’s as if they know they’ve got it sewn up already. But in case they’re wrong, and Orange Julius Caesar really does win, I fear being targeted by his administration for my dissent. Could you use your personal connections with Obergruppenfuhrer Roger Stone to keep me out of the camps? I’ll be your friend.
Sean “Jim Treacher” Medlock
Sorry, Sean/Jim. Despite my journalistic past with Mr. Stone, no-can-do on the intervention. I have to save up my favor-seeking capital for Priority One, aka, me. After Donald Trump, Jr., last week, gave his old man a much needed day off from saying embarrassing things in public, he stepped in it after stating that the media lets Hillary and her DNC lackeys skate on all manner of dirty pool and dishonesty. If Republicans did the same, Junior suggested, “they’d be warming up the gas chambers right now.” To me, it actually sounded like a capital-punishment joke. But the oversensitive media interpreted it as an inappropriate Holocaust reference. (Which figures, since as my sources in the alt-right movement tell me, you-know-who controls the media. Hint: they rhyme with “shoes.”)
Whatever the case, everyone in Trump World is a little sensitive about camp references at the moment. Even broaching the topic might get me sent to one if Mr. Trump is elected. And let’s face it, as someone who works in the belly of the #NeverTrump beast, I’m probably headed to one anyway. So I’m trying to at least secure a cushy camp work detail. Perhaps poking Ted Cruz with a cattle prod through the bars of his tiger cage. Or maybe, since this is indeed America’s Orange Revolution, I might get to work the airbrush gun at the spray-tannery.
But I’m more interested in the first half of your question, the part where everyone keeps yelling at you for being a principled non-voter. This cycle, I’m a proud member of the same fraternity. And I, too, have been getting jawed at an awful lot by friends, loved ones, and random hecklers. Even in our polarized times, this has been, by any standard, an overheated election. Forget professional agitators/Trump throne-sniffers like Sean Hannity wanting to karate-chop people’s heads off who don’t fall in line. At dinner tables across America, it’s been brother against brother, father against son, or—if my gender-fluidity glossary is to be believed—auncle vs. niecew.
This, perhaps you’ve heard, is the most critical election of our time. Just as the last five or ten elections have been. Never mind that precisely none of the seven presidential elections I’ve been eligible to vote in seem to have righted the ship or to have made my life noticeably better. Yet I’m still supposed to dutifully subscribe to this quadrennial farce as though my very life depended on it. Perhaps out of boredom, perhaps out of helplessness, we seem to ascribe mystical non-existent powers to our presidents, who almost never deliver. As my friend, the political consultant Mudcat Saunders, likes to say about our presidential magical thinking, he suspects the Potomac River is the holiest in the world, “since you can take the dumbest sonofabitch, and put him on the other side of that river, and all of a sudden it becomes Good Will Hunting.”
A couple times, over the years, when my conscience, such as it is, has dictated sitting elections out, I have written Apathy Party manifestoes. Though in keeping with the spirit of the enterprise, I didn’t care enough to actually get an Apathy Party up and running. And I will not now rehash all of my findings in those pieces, from why, statistically speaking, your special-snowflake vote is nearly meaningless, to why countries with atrocious standards of living and human-rights records often have much higher voter turnouts than we do, putting this noble act of civic participation that people so readily congratulate themselves for on a par with returning a library book on time. Perhaps the latter is even more noble, since who knows how many of your fellow citizens are anxiously awaiting your return of Trump’s Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life or Hillary’s Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets. (Sadly, I am not making these up.)
In this particular election, of course, there is a wide swath of the electorate who is not enthusiastic about either Hillary or Trump, but who will nevertheless lecture you on the moral imperative of voting for one or the other in a hold-your-nose-and-kiss-your-sister Hobson’s Choice. Trump might be a sociopathic narcissist, who cheats at golf and on his wives, who tries to steal old ladies’ houses, who changes his mind almost as often as he’s changed his party registration (five times–but who’s counting?), who has no impulse control or moral center, and who tweets likes he’s in a junior-high girl-fight. But he is apparently the only person who can enforce our borders (which I’m for), who talks tougher than Obama on Islamic nutcakes (who doesn’t?), who won’t get us into elective wars (unless some foreign minister trolls him on Twitter, then all bets are off), and who will bring manufacturing jobs back to America (keep wishfully texting that to each other on your Chinese-made iPhones while wearing your Chinese-made Trump ties).
Hillary might be a congenital liar, an enabler of her sex-criminal husband, and a charmless Queen of the Spelling Bee whose ambition has always exceeded her talent by about a ten-to-one margin, but she’s the only one who can…well, I have nothing else to offer on Hillary. That’s pretty much her in a nut, except I guess that she’s the only one who can stop Trump, which seems to be good enough for most Democrats, and even some Republicans.
My point here isn’t that we can do better. Because it’s too late to do better. And that is our collective fault. These are the choices we have. But these are the choices that we have made. They weren’t inflicted on us by some mysterious outside force. We allowed them to happen. We have to “own it,” as Hong Kong Phooey Hannity likes to say.
I should add that I have plenty of friends who are voting for Hillary. And I have plenty of friends and family who are voting for Trump in good conscience. And I have full confidence that after this election is over, our relationships will be as solid as ever, assuming they start speaking to me again. I do not harangue them about their choices. But conversely, I’d appreciate them not haranguing me over mine—which is to make no choice between these two candidates that I regard as woefully inferior specimens. If you want to vote for Trump, that’s between you and your God. If you want to vote for Hillary, that’s between you and Satan. Go ahead. Knock yourselves out. Just please leave me out of it. I enjoy not having blood on my hands in our nation’s mutual suicide pact. Or to switch metaphors, if we suspect that our car is getting steered into a ditch on the right side of the road, or the left side of the road, should it really matter to us on which side of the road that ditch lies? I’d prefer our car just stay on the road.
But more optimistically, I’m not about to predict the republic can’t withstand either of these two moral pygmies. We’ve survived a lot worse together: slavery, a Great Depression, two World Wars, a Civil War (in which we literally killed 620,000 of each other), and, most dauntingly, three years of Piers Morgan Live. So this too, shall pass.
Even if we can’t do better in this election, as of this writing, there are only 50 more days until one of these two is elected. And 123 days until one of them is inaugurated. After that, it’s only four more years until we can do better. And we should really think about how to do better.
Most presidents fail, but often in ways we never expect them to. I wish whomever becomes president well. As we face this Morton’s Fork in the road, I sincerely hope they succeed and prove me wrong. I will happily eat crow—a small price to pay, if they actually help this country of ours, which is undeniably ailing and on the downward slide. As a professional pessimist, I constantly have to remind myself that even if the world is going to hell, it often does so not in the ways we anticipate but in ways we’ve not yet conceived of. Which is, in itself, cause for fatalistic bank-shot optimism. At the very least, we can be consoled by the prospect that our pessimism might be misallocated.
And at the very most, we can turn to the words of Marilynne Robinson, who in her essay collection, The Givenness of Things, had made one of the most damning cases against pessimism that I’ve encountered, worth quoting at length:
In one of my aforementioned apathy manifestoes, I closed with a quote from Lord Falkland: “When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make a decision.” But Ask Matt, I can hear some readers say, right now is when it is necessary to make a decision between these two dog turds for candidates, our country hangs in the balance. Maybe you are right. Maybe you are wrong. I’ll get back to you if I feel it’s necessary to decide.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
