VA Day

 I wasn't around for VE and VJ Days, but it must have looked like this, minus the masks and social distancing -- Americans spontaneously pouring into the streets of New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, dancing, singing, cheering.  Not long after the Associated Press called Pennsylvania and therefore the election for Joseph R. Biden and Kamala Harris, relief and joy were palpable, champagne was uncorked, bands played.  Victory in America Day -- fortuitously, a Saturday with magnificent autumn weather -- and the overwhelming emotion was "IT'S OVER."   The campaign, the election, the count, above all the four-year nightmare of hate, stupidity and fear.  

Of course, nothing is over, especially covid, which killed 1,223 of us yesterday and infected thousands more.  With only hopes for a vaccine and effective therapeutics, with the disease hopelessly politicized, covid will be the first great challenge of all the new president's skill at persuasion and reason, and for those beyond the reach of either, stern measures that will surely bring cries of "tyranny."  The economy is a mess and so is the infrastructure, and neither can be addressed while the virus rules.

Climate change can't be addressed in four or eight years, but at least we can rejoin the Paris Agreement; admitting you have a problem is the first step, isn't it?  And we have a problem, as exemplified by powerful hurricanes and typhoons, almost perpetual wildfires and droughts, melting ice cap, disappearing fresh water, there's no good news.  (Water on the moon, if true, is not good news.)  

Racism, America's original sin, remains unredeemed, to borrow the language of the president-elect's church.  One look at the map will remind him that Black lives matter -- including but not limited to those in Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Chicago and Las Vegas that won him otherwise red states.  These voters, many first timers, expect their needs to be addressed;  no longer hearing a president characterize them as "thugs" and "predators" is not enough.  

Even Trump is not over.  There will be amusingly frantic tweets full of threats and gibberish, expensive failed lawsuits, violence from covens of disappointed followers, and a minimum of decency.  He will be there, just over the horizon, stewing and raging (barring a swift and successful prosecution on some felony serious enough to remove him from our field of vision).  The evil he has done will endure.  Give credit where it's due, though.  As pitiful as his inaugural audience was, he certainly motivated millions to vote -- often against steep odds -- and otherwise work to exorcise him.  Trump never won a majority of popular votes, but he did increase his total this year.  Seventy million people wanted four more years of this chaos.  As the Firesign Theater said, it's a little like having bees live in your head.

"Transition" hardly seems like a proper word for the next two months.   "Transformation," maybe, but Joe Biden has never been a transformational figure.  He says it's "time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us," but he must know that won't happen, even as Mitch McConnell proposes to keep on doing what he's doing.  Here's an incredible stat:  Biden won more popular votes than anyone in history, almost 75 million to date.  Would he have done as well against a less repulsive opponent?   In the New York Review of Books Deborah Eisenberg wrote, "If the most powerful position on earth is to be filled by one of the worst humans the gene pool has ever devised or by one of the most mediocre, you'd think the choice would be clear."  Was that it?  We could have had Elizabeth Warren or Beto O'Rourke or even Bernie Sanders, but then we'd be getting drunk and watching the Oaf Keepers and the Prod Boys riot in the streets.  We like mediocre.  We're mediocre people.  We invented Wonder Bread.

On VJ Day we celebrated the return of peace after defeating two enemies who inflicted terrible losses on us and the world, who could have prevailed if luck had run the other way.  We've been the fortunate ones since 1945, walking away from two land wars in Asia and otherwise picking enemies we can handle in the dark.  Trump was the worst threat to America as we would like to know it since then.  I don't want to think about anything now except maybe who Gavin Newsom will pick to replace Vice President-Elect Harris.  Eric Swalwell, Ted Lieu, Katie Porter, so many possibilities...

Fuck it.  Let's dance.