You Cannot Predict the Future

I thought Hillary Clinton would win in 2016. I really did. And I wasn’t alone. Most of us did, including the people paid to predict such things. I was excited for a female president. It meant something huge to me, the idea of seeing a woman in that office. And instead we got what we got. Which was a boiling pot of purulence, seeping and scalding and stinking, for nearly a decade now. I swore that was the last time I’d make a political prediction with any degree of certainty. Since then, I’ve lurched from election to election with my heart in my mouth, but not a word of augury on my lips, and it’s served me well.

Particularly, it must be admitted, in the last ten days or so, when I’ve felt lightly detached from reality, despite avidly following the news. The ear-shot heard round the world; the half-lurid, half-grotesque spectacle of the RNC, a paean to gaudy, flaccid machismo, with its fake fighters and real bigots in an insipid parade; the ceaseless sniping of the press about Biden’s age and fitness. And then he dropped out.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been reading the coverage—the worried, scheming donors, the politicians sticking their heads above the parapet, the endless rehash of the same stories in the same publications about Biden being old. I just never expected him to resign. I never expected to see a crack in the gerontocracy. I don’t think I realized how radicalized I’d become by watching a shingles-ridden Dianne Feinstein wheeled out onto the Senate floor, her eyes dim and without cognizance; Ruth Bader Ginsberg casting off generations of feminist goodwill by leaving an unbridgeable gap on the court; all that decrepit arrogance, those knotted, liver-spotted hands grasping the reins of power so tightly they choked us all. I didn’t expect Biden to stop proclaiming his fitness, despite all the visible and audible evidence to the contrary, until November consigned us to the grim, final decay that is democracy dissolving into autocracy.

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And again. I’m not a prognosticator. While I envy the balletic grace of pundits willing to turn on a dime and start spouting the odds mere moments after major revelations break, I don’t share it, and I’m not willing to assume a bluster I don’t feel equal to. There are things I know—that the American right aims to carve the guts out of every civil-rights advance of the past century or more; that fascism and criminality are bosom buddies; that misogyny pervades every cell of Trump and Trumpism. I don’t claim to know anything about the relative electoral fate of Harris, or who she’s going to select as vice president, or any other feature of the endless Kentucky Derby of our elections.

I do know that for the last decade what I’ve felt is a clash. On the one side is a destructive force whose only motives are avarice and hate, in equal measure, whose actions are predictable because greed and hate are predictable, because stripping the country for parts in real time was always what Trump and his cronies were going to do. (This is a man whose associates automatically become cronies, even if they weren’t before they were in his orbit; he begets cronyism, it’s like a contagious disease). It’s been over nine years since Donald Trump descended down that gilded escalator and changed the way American politics works—or at least scraped any leftover sheen of decorum off it, and let the blood and guts hang low.

And up against that was a force, not in direct opposition to the avarice and the hate, but rather a force for decorum, for manners, for sclerotic incrementalism, for dying in office rather than giving it up—stasis personified. I realize this kind of disgruntlement with the Democratic party won’t do me any favors with much of my audience, and there have been real policy gains over the last four years, but they have been buried in a slurry of faux-outrage and mealy-mouthed politesse that has acted as an affront to anyone looking around at the gaping wounds in this country and seeking, not even full redress, but acknowledgement thereof.

I don’t think Kamala Harris is some radical agent of change; she’s a former DA, a current Vice President, and while I would still very much fucking like to see a woman become president in my lifetime—because it matters, it matters very much—she is both embraced and buoyed by the very same sclerotic establishment I spent the above paragraph castigating. 

Still. In the acknowledgement of something painful and inevitable, in the movement to crack the airless bell jar of gloom around the White House, it feels like some air got let in, some fresh wind that might blow good got in. Maybe by accident.

Maybe I’m just giddy at the idea of a presidential candidate who can put a coherent sentence together. Maybe I’m excited because in her first speech as presumptive nominee, Kamala Harris actually said that Donald Trump is a rapist, adjudicated a rapist, and that matters, because being a rapist should be a disqualification for public office, goddamnit. And then I wonder why it hasn’t been word one, why—faced with the virulent misogyny killing women around the country in emergency rooms and maternity wards—the baffling and infuriating war tactic of the top brass of the Democrats has been passive, handwringing acceptance. Because I have been raped and sexually assaulted, and a woman standing up and saying rape and sexual assault are not acceptable qualifications for public office—that they are, in fact, disqualifications—opened something in me I didn’t realize had been scarred closed for a long time.

Maybe I’ve been so angry, on a subliminal level, for so long, that the release of even a fraction of that anger feels like a humid sky opening in rain. I can feel my anger like the hissing of water on hot asphalt. Maybe what I’m feeling is the strange petrichor of rage and hope combining, like the smell of new rain on stone.