Folk Saints in the Burn Room

This is what happened:

There were 231,556,622 eligible voters on election night;

25.9% of eligible voters voted for Clinton;

25.8% of eligible voters voted for Trump;

46.5% of eligible voters didn’t vote;

I threw up twice.

You will note that more people voted for Clinton. And that nearly a hundred and ten million people who could have voted did not. People did not vote because of:

voter ID laws;

voter intimidation;

Indifference.

Clinton lost because of an unaddressed flaw in the U.S. Constitution. This flaw results from an early attempt to circumvent the Electoral College. The Founders intended this body to be a check on the power of the voting public. The votes of its electors have technically conferred the presidency onto every candidate who has sought it. If the people were ever seduced by a demagogue and made the mistake of voting for him, the Electoral College would be, it was thought, a last layer of protection preventing that demagogue from attaining power. However, very soon after the adoption of the Electoral College, its elitist intent was undermined. The states began to require that all of its electors vote identically. This strategy exposes the flaw: When each state pledges all of its electors to whomever wins the most votes there it becomes possible for a presidential candidate to win that office by persuading fewer total voters than their opponent. This has happened five times: 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and presently. It has been the result in 11% of presidential elections. The irony arising from Trump’s election in this way is suffocating.

Clinton lost because of a strain of Nativism that has persisted, basically unaltered, in the white voters of the Eastern half of the United States since the 1820’s. The wave that made the present catastrophe possible was created by people who think of themselves as the original inhabitants of this country; people who live in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio. This belief–that their residency in the United States is more valid than that of those who came later–is the primal eldest source of Conservatism in this country. The expression of this belief has been strongly suppressed by the business-oriented Conservatism that arose after the Industrial Revolution in America. But as heavy industry fled the U.S. the hereditary workers who formerly serviced it have rolled back the newer varieties of Conservatism to expose the original.

This is what will happen:

America’s well known corporate forces will consolidate around the Trump administration. These forces will have rightly judged him to be a weak president, liable to manipulation. (You may imagine a boa constrictor squeezing its prey tighter and tighter.)

These constrictions will make it all but impossible for Trump-the-president to be as unhinged as Trump-the-candidate. Corporations will have an easier time making money. There will be no nuclear war, primarily because this would adversely affect the business climate.

Bowl after bowl of shit will be presented to Trump, which he will have to eat again and again. He will be told that this is necessary and that if he did not want to eat shit every day he should not have sought the presidency. One after another, his insane campaign promises will be publically eaten as bowls of shit. The corporate stranglehold on a Trump presidency will enforce this.

American business interests will, in this way, buttress the loose rubble of a Trump presidency and stabilize it. Needless to say, the stability their infiltration will provide is going to come at a terrible social cost for those of us who do not live or die by the weather on Wall St.

It will be a spectacularly corrupt four years on the domestic scene.

Global wildcards like ISIS will become unusually dangerous. This is because the coils of American capitalism can stabilize a stupid administration but they cannot make it smart, let alone proactive. There will be many joints and much soft flesh for the world’s unpredictable actors to exploit in the next decade of history.

The Supreme Court will be lost for ten years or more. Astonishing rollbacks of women’s rights, minority rights, civil liberties and voting rights are likely.

The last, best hope for holding the global temperature anomaly to two degrees Celsius above historical norms will expire. The lives of our great-grandchildren will be markedly different from what any of us would have chosen for them.

This is what happens next:

I will brush my teeth before I go to bed.

I will read a book about a Babylonian king named Gilgamesh and his friend, the wild man Enkidu. Their story was written down on clay tablets four thousand years ago. These tablets were in a royal library when that library, along with much of the city it was in, was burned to the ground by invaders. The heat from this disaster had the effect of firing the clay. In this way, thousands of tablets became vitreous and immensely durable.

I will wake up and brush my teeth.

I will clean my house.

I will go about my work.

The Dovecote by AZO

Jaybo Monk  You Are Fired 2014

There is a poem embossed on the pillow: