"A red state turns purple with suppressed rage before finally blowing up blue."

The Muse and I live in an area reportedly beset with voles. Our neighborhood ListServ frequently reports troubles blamed on the hamster-like critters, though we've never experienced a single instance. They're essentially invisible tunnel dwellers, browsing from the bottom up, apparently devastating some neighbors' plantings. We try to keep with native plants, not mistaking this region as part of the Northern Arboreal Belt. Trying to maintain some semblance of a classic English Country Garden here seems to buy more trouble than satisfaction, so we keep our garden aspirations modest and hopefully aligned to our seventy eight hundred arid feet of altitude. We consider the lowly vole as much a part of the native fauna as the deer and the elk, features rather than pests, and we try to live while letting them live.

Come election day, though, it seems as though the voles rush to the polls to cast votes in favor of those initiatives only a tunnel-dweller could love. One next morning glimpse tells the whole story again. The sway has been painfully slowly moving further toward the boundary between rabid and sane, but still seems overall more rodent-inspired than enlightened. The Muse and I perform our part, counterbalancing what we can, but we receive another shock the following morning as we watch our temporary homeland insist upon staying firmly stuck in its tunneling past. Traditions, especially those traditions which worked a whole lot better for the so-called betters than the designated others, sustain themselves with alarming consistency. Taxes remain reviled in any form. Gangsters, who mustered sufficient support to place yet another gambling initiative on the ballot, apparently spent their millions well, reinforcing the usual lie that more broadly legalizing gambling will benefit society. Why, I wonder, do we not legalize prostitution, pedophlia, and drunken driving as untapped, taxless revenue sources? Morality rarely gets mentioned in any voter's pamphlet.

So, Colorado will now allow sports betting, a form of endless entertainment for the innumerate and a state-sanctioned reinforcement for addiction for those so cursed, and a much better revenue stream for the gangsters than it will ever be for the state. The Republicans running as non-partisan and too chicken shit to come out and declare their closet affiliation wrap themselves up in muted flags and dog whistle convictions to fool a majority again. We're trying to repeal perhaps the worst public policy in the history of states' rights, the so-called Taxpayer Bill Of Rights, a transparent attempt to smother necessary government while letting the wealthiest citizens off Scott free from their rightful responsibilities, but no dice yet. A red state turns purple with suppressed rage before finally blowing up blue. A time will eventually come, probably long after The Muse and I flee back into the future again, when the future finally and decisively arrives here.

I cannot determine from here whether the polls were overrun with voles or lemmings, just that the results came as a shock to my delicate, snowflake sensibilities. Again. They seem to come in waves, entranced with half-truths, fully believing that they're casting votes for liberty and justice, when they're only further encouraging what's become of a uniquely American Way. A yarn gets spun on a dizzying wheel. That yarn becomes what's touted to be whole cloth on a loom of half-truths. That cloth gets cut into identical uniforms to designate individuality and free-thinking, then hoards which simply must have been living in underground tunnels between elections storm the polls and we throw ourselves backward again. Praise the PR machine from which all such blessings flow while our founders spin in ever shallower graves. We're starring in our very own reality show, which in dog whistle language means that we must have long ago abandoned reality in favor of a sham.

©2019 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #GlancingKnow, #PureSchmaltz