Happy Election Apocalypse Day!

 

 'Twas the day before Election Night, and what should appear, but boarded-up buildings, folks quaking in fear.

Or at least that is what the TV and establishment media are reporting and graphically showing us. If people aren't shooting each other over lawn signs bearing the grimacing dentured visages of one or the other of our unattractive geriatric candidates, they're roaming the highways looking for a campaign bus to run off the road. 

Either people really are going sincerely insane over an election that will essentially determine which man will get to serve the oligarchy for the next four years while screwing everyone else, or we're all just unwitting, unpaid actors on a stage or unpaid amateur Kayfabe wrestlers in an invisible ring.

Are either Trump or Biden really worth fighting with your relatives over, and losing friends over?  Why can't everybody just make it the five-minute civic duty that it was intended to be, a mere blip on the radar of our lives?

Election Night feels almost like Christmas Eve. (And yes, it should be a national holiday with mandatory voting.) We'll finally find out who's been naughty or nice. And when it's all over, it'll probably feel just like the letdown that children get after opening the very last present underneath the Christmas tree. That is if Biden wins in an undisputed landslide. No more guessing, no more wishing. You got exactly what you wanted, but it just didn't give you the euphoria that you were expecting.

Here's one of the Doomsday scenarios that nobody is talking about, because doing so would tamp down the fear and excitement and hurt the ratings:

Joe Biden wins so resoundingly tonight in a few early key battleground states that there can be no question of fraud. Trump concedes at around 3 a.m.,graciously calling Biden to congratulate him.  All his threatening talk turned out to be just talk! He turned out be nothing but a great big blustering fake. Who could have guessed? What a bummer. What a letdown for all the prognosticators who were forecasting a coup. They'll be as open-mouthed and flabbergasted as they were on that dreadful night four years ago when the Inevitable Hillary lost.

Scattered riots might break out and a few irate people will shoot each other because that is what is expected of them, and networks with air to fill and fear to foment will have to cover even a deflated aftermath like it's the outbreak of Civil War 2.0.

Meanwhile, Trump will be seeking and signing non-prosecution agreements with various state attorneys general as part of his deal to go away quietly. He'll be putting out bids for multiple post-presidential reality TV shows as well as inking movie and book and branding and motivational speaking circuit deals. Like Obama, he will forgo the traditional presidential library and start fundraising like mad for a Trump Presidential Entertainment Resort complex complete with a professional golf course and with no books except for his own self-glorifying memoirs. All his presidential papers will be selectively digitized.

Biden will be putting his own finishing touches on his bipartisan cabinet, collating the various recommendations from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

With the Democrats attaining a slim majority in the Senate, they'll immediately let bygones be bygones with the Republicans. Like Harry Reid before him, new Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will make a gentlemen's agreement with a pretend-conciliatory Mitch McConnell to keep the filibuster in place in exchange for McConnell's promise not to abuse it this time.  As a sign of his temporary good faith, McConnell will even agree to a watered-down Covid relief package. Trump agrees to sign it in exchange for a pardon from Joe Biden. Biden will channel Gerald Ford and declare that our long national nightmare is over. He will also channel Barack Obama's refusal to prosecute Bush-era torturers and war criminals by vowing that we must look forward and not backward.

 Trump's rehabilitation will begin.

That is just one of a zillion scenarios. We'll know soon enough if mine is a crazy pipe dream. But just in case Santa is watching, let's at least try to pretend to be nice to one another. Because the ruling oligarchy is simply not worth losing our humanity or our lives over.