Primary Day is Here

I don't have much taste for writing about politics anymore and maybe I will never write about them in the future, but tomorrow is Primary day and it is still a big event where I live, so I suppose I ought to try to explain what I think about what it is going on as much as I can.

I've thought a lot in recent years about giving up voting, since I don't seem to be able to grasp the most important issues and most salient facts about the candidates, adequately explain my votes or positions to rational people, and so forth. I haven't committed to doing this yet because I believe it is still to my benefit, as well as that of the nation as a whole, to take some part in the process than to leave it entirely to the more serious and impassioned people, whom I do not entirely trust to always act with more perfect wisdom in my behalf in spite of their apparent superior grasp of the constitution, economics, justice, the voting and legislative history of the candidates, and all of the other components of political debate.

I will confess that I am almost certainly going to vote for Sanders, barring a last minute semi- miraculous revelation with regard to the heretofore hidden greatness and necessity of one of the other characters. I have spent more time examining the revulsion I experience at the thought of voting for Hillary Clinton than I should have. Ultimately, it is her job as a candidate to make the public desire to support her, not the public's to have to justify themselves for not wanting to support her. Would she be a terrible president? Probably not I guess, assuming events remained on a normal track, though I have not seen anything that leads me to believe she would be a great leader in any kind of major crisis. That is not to say that Bernie Sanders shows any signs of being Churchillian either, but he at least comes off as having more affection for the people and the country overall, disdain for the financial 0.1 percent aside--hey, in the books written in the 40s, 50s, and 60s that I grew up reading, it never said that we had to love J.P. Morgan and Jay Gould to be patriotic Americans, anyway--and the Clintons and their various allies ran off everyone else from running.  The entitlement with which her entire campaign has been run to this point is unbelievable. When her canvassers call or come to your door, they are insistent in trying to get you to commit yourself to vote for Hillary, and then if you give them that of course they harass for all kinds of other personal data about you, all very technocratic, and all executed, in the character of many of the candidate's, and her camp's, own observations about her possible defeat in our state, with an ominous air suggesting that disloyalty, or rejection, as the case may be, will be punished in good time. Jeanne Shaheen, our hapless Democratic senator and apparent lapdog of the Clintons, has been put to work shilling for Hillary in various commercials and at events with the kind of exaggerated enthusiasm that suggests that the details of these endorsements were hammered out in a windowless room under heavy florescent lighting in a warehouse somewhere in Northern Virginia. I am also aware that Bernie Sanders (probably) can't get elected, that his proposals will never be implemented, that if they were implemented the country would immediately be bankrupted, all societal organization would collapse entirely, and we would be essentially laying ourselves open to foreign invasion, of both the military and emigrant varieties, and we would be defenseless before them. I guess I don't care anymore. What are my objections to Hillary Clinton's positions? Well, I can't recall her saying anything that made me say, 'yes, that would be good, I would really like to see that issue pushed or promoted'. It's always how her way is better or smarter than other people's. Bernie Sanders at least talks somewhat about specific things that people are actually concerned about. I don't think his free college plan is particularly brilliant, but, I understand that 'college' in the sense he is using it here is going to be more of a no-frills, high school like experience intended either to qualify people for the decent-paying jobs that they cannot get currently or to press the national media and political and business establishments to concede that the real state of things with regard to paid employment for most people going forward (is bleak?) and to begin to re-organize society accordingly. The college system on the macro-scale (i.e., not my alma mater; we are outside the system of course) does not seem sustainable, and its current role in society probably needs to be re-evaluated. Seriously, I thought in 2008 that the student debt crisis would have forced major changes by now. (My oldest kid was 6 then, now he's almost 14, and nothing seems to have changed as that looms on the horizon)...

I received a robocall the other day with a recording of Jared Taylor speaking in support of Donald Trump. Jared Taylor is, I believe, fairly well known as something of a white supremacist, and I do not tar people with that label as easily as some others might. But Jared Taylor comes off as actively not liking other kinds of people and promoting a kind of unpleasant militancy among white people, which is different from standing up for yourself and having some pride and a sense of dignity with regard to who you are and where you have come from when this is merited, which I don't think is objectionable.

We've been hearing a lot in recent weeks around Ted Cruz's incredible intelligence, which might even be more rawly powerful than Hillary Clinton's, given how reporters and other pundits seem to be cowering in awe before it. Other than mastering how to navigate power structures to most benefit them, these brilliant people don't seem to have a lot of very interesting thoughts about anything, that they care to share with the public anyway, though if they understandably don't want to share their deepest insights, it seems like there must be some level at which they would be free to give a glimpse of the light...But I am out of time now.