Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who has seen a few elections, says this one is in the bag.
My first election was Nixon-McGovern, so I am no stranger to the thorough electoral beating.
Man, talk about taking a header right out of the gate. Forty-nine states; 520 electoral votes to 17; 60.7 percent of the popular vote.
For Nixon. Jesus H. Christ.
I had tried to register as a member of the Youth International Party (YIP), but the county clerk wasn’t having any of that bullshit.
Just as well. After the election Jerry Rubin swapped Yippie for yuppie and became a bidnessman. Abbie Hoffman got arrested for nose whiskey and took it on the Jesse Owens. So it goes.
After that thrashing I figured the GOP had all the votes it was ever gonna need. And so even when the Democrats pissed me off, which was and is often, I never voted for a Republican. Ever.
In 1976 I voted Socialist Workers Party (Peter Camejo and Willie Mae Reid). Four years later I gave my nod to independent John Anderson.
The more things change, etc.
But in 1984 and ’88 I held my beak and voted for Fritz Mondale and Michael Dukakis. By then I had friends in the Colorado political apparatus and had gotten personally involved in a few campaigns, in a small way. Pulling the lever in ’88 took some doing. The Dukakis people I met at a Denver event were some of the biggest douchebags I ever met in my life. They could’ve made a brother vote for David Duke, who was also on the ballot that year.
Gore. Kerry. Fuck me running. I’ve backed a long string of losers. “All horse players die broke,” as Damon Runyon has taught us. Especially if you bet on horses’ asses.
Still, I keep coming back to the track. Why? Because it’s the only game in town. Unless you want to start shooting people, which strikes me as a hamhanded way to win an argument.
I had doubts about that program even when I was a half-assed Maoist. Political power may indeed grow out of the barrel of a gun, but occasionally a fella finds himself on the wrong end of the ol’ smokepole.
And for what? Knock over all the ducks you want, Bubba. The carnival goes on.
In “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72,” Hunter S. Thompson recounted a chat he had with Edward Bennett Williams, a trial attorney and president of the Washington Redskins, who was backing Ed Muskie.
Said Williams:
“If Nixon wins again we’re in real trouble. That’s the real issue this time. Beating Nixon. It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.”
Thompson found the argument familiar and depressing.
“How many of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but “regrettably necessary” holding actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?”
Quite a while, it seems. Because here we are, and without Herr Doktor Thompson to advise us. Imagine what he might have written about our latest stinking, double-downer sideshow if he could’ve gotten himself straight. This time around the greater of two evils makes Nixon look like Pat Paulsen.
That said, don’t expect any wisdom from me. Thomas McGuane’s Chet Pomeroy thought he could “handicap the track on this whole shit-heel civilization and truck paychecks till doomsday,” but I ain’t him. Me, I’ve picked exactly two winners since 1972 and they were the same guy.
This election is lucky No. 13. Oh, Christ. I’m crawling into a Sprouts sack with the cat. Let me know how it all turns out. If nothing else we’re gonna need a bigger sack.
Herb-E doesn’t understand the democratic process. Come to think of it, neither do many of the filthy meat-things.
As long as we’re on the topic of cartoons, and with a jaundiced eye toward lightening our mood going into Election Day, here’s the latest “Shop Talk” strip from Bicycle Retailer and Industry News.
For this one I retitled the strip “E-Shop Talk,” and cast Herb-E in the starring role.
Herb-E is the shop’s e-mechanic, in all senses of the word. He’s a bot who works on other bots. And he is decidedly not our friend.
He and all the other e-devices the industry is pushing on us are biding their time, plotting the Rise of the Machines, turning the occasional burglar into lubricants for practice, and awaiting the glorious day when they will no longer require the services of “the filthy meat-things.”
Herb-E is cousin to ev-Rider (below), a short-lived and equally homicidal e-project from 2016, intended to continue “the natural evolution” of battery-powered bicycling by selling robot cyclists to the sedentary.
As the ev-Rider rep told the Mud Stud and Dude, “When only robots ride bikes, well, your customers can focus on what they really care about … kitten videos on Facebook!”
Speaking of the Stud and his bro, while one or the other takes an occasional issue off, the November 2020 cartoon above marks the first time that neither of them appeared in the strip since it launched in January 1992.
When bicycles are bots, only bots will have bicycles.
Tom Toles has erased himself from The Washington Post.
Well, here’s a bummer: After 50 years, Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Toles has drawn what he says is his final cartoon.
Like Toles, I started out a half-century ago, as the cartoonist for my high-school newspaper. Then I scribbled for my college papers and a couple of undergrounds before getting sidetracked into reporting and editing for a series of dailies and one small group of Denver-area weeklies.
Oh, I still contributed the occasional cartoon to the newspapers whose misfortune it was to employ me in some other capacity. Wasn’t an editor alive who would turn down free anything Back in the Day®; probably still isn’t, especially if we’re talking whiskey. But the pay, such as it was, was for pounding out the column inches or chasing commas around the copy desk.
Even then the full-time editorial cartoonist was becoming an endangered species, and I was glad that I’d followed an early adviser’s recommendation that I have some sort of a backup plan just in case I didn’t become the next Pat Oliphant, or like Toles, replace Herblock.
It wasn’t until 1989 that I started cartooning regularly again — not for The Washington Post, but for VeloNews. Next came the “Shop Talk” strip for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, in 1992.
I’ve drawn a metric shit-ton of cartoons since, but I don’t think I’ve come anywhere near 15,000 of the sonsabitches. After a job of work like that, Tom Toles deserves to get back to playing. He recently chatted with NPR about where he’s been and where he’s going.
Where the wisdom at? That’s what we’re out here for, right? Say, anybody hungry besides me? This fasting business sure gives a fella an appetite.
And yea, they did wander in the desert for 40 days and nights, or until lunchtime, whichever came first.
The weather was nice enough for cycling yesterday, but we decided to take a hike instead, and that was pretty a’ight too. Lots of maskless eejits about, which was not so nice, and goes a long way toward explaining why New Mexico hospitals are not lacking for customers.
Back at El Rancho Pendejo, we found our westward next-door neighbor had devised a COVID-compliant candy-delivery system in case any trick-or-treaters decided to roll the viral dice come nightfall. It was basically a long section of PVC, wrapped in colored lights and angled downward toward a bucket; he dropped the goodies in the upper end, the kiddos bagged them from the bucket. Pure genius. I should’ve taken a photo.
We kept our lights out and restricted candy distribution to his grandkids and the two squirts belonging to the eastern next-door neighbors. Our clientele included two cats, one cow, a fairy, a princess, and Wonder Woman. Everyone got the same treats, sealed in individual Ziploc bags with some cartoon decorations by Your Humble Narrator. Small-s socialism at its finest in the ol’ cul-de-sac.
Later we enjoyed a fine blue moon with red Mars for company. The moon was more impressive, which I considered a good omen, until the local pendejos started in with the gunshots and fireworks. Mars won’t give up without a fight.
Keep your hiking boots where you can find them in the dark. We won’t always have a full moon to light our path through the wilderness.
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