When I went to bed early on Super Tuesday it seemed Texas was trending socialist.
This was obviously a hallucination. I was critically low on endorphins after 11 days without exercise, thanks to a broken right ankle. And I was slightly crazed on antihistamines, the junipers, mulberries, cottonwoods, willows, and elms all having sprung to hideous life seemingly overnight.
Even while thus impaired, I knew a Texas Democrat could pass for Republican practically anywhere else, and the thought of that crowd going for Comrade Eeyore in the primary seemed the product of a disordered mind. You know. Like Ronald the Donald winning the last presidential election.
And sure enough, it was. Daffy Uncle Joe bounced back while I tossed and turned, slobbering all over my pillow and freezing my nuts off in the guest bedroom, because somebody around here has to get a good night’s sleep before going to work in the morning, and that somebody is not me.
Sure, Texas has embraced a wide swath of eccentrics. Kinky Friedman. Ted Cruz and his beard. Molly Ivins. Louie Gohmert. Actually, Ted Cruz’s beard deserves a mention all its own.
Ted Cruz’s beard.
But Comrade Eeyore is a cranky old socialist from Brooklyn. The thought of him prevailing in Texas over Joe Stalin, much less Joe Biden, put me in mind of the 1980s Pace Picante Sauce commercial featuring a bunch of cowboys playing cards and talking salsa.
“Why, this stuff’s made in New York City!”
“New York City?”
Of course, Pace Foods Ltd. would be snatched up a few years later by the Campbell Soup Co., with headquarters in Camden, New Jersey. Not New York, but close enough to take the bloom off that San Antonio rose.
But by then Texas was preoccupied with developing products for export that were even even feebler than bottled picante sauce. I refer you to George W. Bush and Rick Perry.
And Ted Cruz’s beard.
Speaking of the coronavirus, which we were not, is anybody else revisiting apocalyptic tales like “The Andromeda Strain” or Stephen King’s “The Stand?”
A random quote from the latter popped into my head this morning. While collecting chickens to feed her visitors, Mother Abagail notes, “The only thing dumber than a broody hen was a New York Democrat.”
Maybe so. But I don’t know why she’d want to restrict the dumb to New York.
Daffy Uncle Joe and his backers are dancing a jig over his performance last night, and yeah, it truly was the sort of comeback-kid narrative that has veteran political reporters writing hack bullshit like “comeback kid.”
But let’s keep in mind that the states where Unc’ prevailed were largely ones where the Hilldebeast got stomped like ants at a picnic in 2016, when it wasn’t just Democrats and broody hens voting: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina.
And if the Anybody But Bernie Caucus proves victorious, and Daffy Uncle Joe becomes the nominee, well, sure, we’ll be spared the easy shots about socialism, Fidel, and honeymooning in the Soviet Union.
But we’ll also have the United States Senate working as an arm of the Republican campaign, trying to beat ol’ Joe to death with his own son.
I get it. Charlie Pierce says “a large part of the Democratic primary electorate is hungering for a president that it can ignore for four or five days a week.”
But how do you sell that empty suit with aviator shades to the customers who weren’t buying in 2016? Or 2004, or 2000? The ones who wondered why a woman couldn’t get a fair shake, or were surprised to learn that “socialism” is one of Carlin’s Seven Words, or bought all the tripe about how Hillary was the Devil and Gore was a geek and Kerry was a Viet Cong spy?
Kinky Friedman already tried “Why the Hell Not?” and “How Hard Could It Be?” And “Bemused, Not Batshit” isn’t much of a bumper sticker.
• Editor’s note: I was going to do this as a podcast, but my brain seems stuck in first gear and there’s smoke coming out of my ears. So, um, no.
• Editor’s note revisited: OK, so I did it anyway. This one’s lo-fi even by my casual standards — I used an ATR2100-USB mic, and skipped the Zoom H5 Handy Recorder in favor of recording directly to the MacBook Pro using Rogue Amoeba’s nifty little app Piezo. Editing was as usual, in GarageBand. I sucked it up despite illness and injury because I’m fixated on doing a podcast a week for no particular reason.
