Midterminal Blues

There's already enough churnalism on the midterm elections without my adding to the glut. 

I spent most of the weekend not answering the insistent pounding on my door from unpaid campaign volunteers and ignoring the incessant reverberations on my cellphone from racist robocallers. I wasted precious minutes of my life relegating to the trash folder the never-ending demands for cash flooding my email in-box.

 At least, since I no longer pay for the torture that is cable TV, I was spared the misery of watching what are alleged by cable victims to be some the nastiest political ads in recent memory. 

Nor will I add to the chorus of "voter-shaming" being brayed from political operatives and pundits from far-right, center-right and center-pseudo-left, who chide us that our failure (or more aptly, our refusal) to vote for the pre-vetted candidates of the oligarchy will endanger our very existence as human beings.

Me? I already voted early by mail, as I always do. I chose Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins for governor of New York over the terminally corrupt Democrat Andrew Cuomo. Hawkins has never won an election in his whole life, but he actually garners a respectable percentage every time he runs. He even got a fairly friendly write-up in the New York Times. The establishment paper of record usually gives friendly write-ups to politicians it doesn't consider much of a threat to the status quo. That way, they can appear to be fair and balanced to the despised left among their readership.

 Since Democrat Antonio Delgado and Republican John Faso are in a dead heat in my district, I am sad to report that I held my nose and voted for Delgado.... but on the Working Families Party line, not the D line. This is the very first time I have ever voted "strategically," because although I have absolutely no expectation that Delgado would actually do much of anything for "working" (what about the single, the retired, the unemployed and those still in school?) people if he wins, at least he would presumably not fall into the Trump tank and cheer for refugees to get shot or imprisoned at the border. Plus, he only has two years in which to do the bidding of Wall Street. Besides, the next two years in a Democratic majority House of Reps look to to be nothing but non-stop theater and grandstanding about neoliberal values vs fascist values, with a host of Trump cabinet officials getting hauled before committees. The shaming will have the main, if not sole, purpose of embarrassing Trump and boosting Democratic fortunes for the interminable presidential sweepstakes, which begin at precisely midnight tonight.

And that's all I have to say for now about the Midterminals.