The Coma Before The Storm

Every post I write about the interregnum du jour was intended to be the last. In posting such terrible ruminations I’ve unwisely flown my freak flag. There’s nothing more to do but wait for the inevitable top-down forcible correction. Sycophants in the press / social media propaganda complex will continue to broadcast that no sentient being on planet earth would agree with me until even my dog believes it. They’ll prove their journalistic mettle by grilling the Potato in Chief about important issues like the flavor of ice cream he just bought. Meanwhile, jackbooted thugs will have the proper address at which to curbstomp me for wrongthink. In a fortnight I’ll be found in a cubicle, wearing a tie, freshly rehabilitated and bitching about that pesky war with Eastasia. But then another article pops up that gives me hope. Hope is dangerous dammit!

Please click to The Coma Before The Storm. It’s a homerun!

Here are a few tasty thoughts:

“This epoch is the interregnum, a caretaker presidency presided over by a human asterisk…”

Couldn’t have said it better myself!

“The progs were so close, just a vote or two away, to the unrestrained power they thought they could flex and thereby secure their control forever. But * is no Franklin Roosevelt. Nor is he Teddy Roosevelt. Nor Eleanor Roosevelt…”

The election of 2020 unquestionably appears like a “more votes than have ever before counted” cheat. If it’s not a cheat, they did a galactically bad job of selling an epic win! The truth is likely worse and we all know it. Facts are coming out in drips and drabs day by day, week by week, month by month. It’s not over. They can’t stop the signal.

That’s why “shut up and eat your talking points” isn’t getting traction. They went a bridge too far and we all saw it happen. They won a battle that may, should, and possibly will lose the war. There’s a word for this. Allow me to indulge in a bit of history:

In 279 BC King Pyrrhus of Epirus (Greek) set out to fuck up Rome. The Romans could not defeat Pyrrhus but they sure as hell tried. They fought like madmen. After a two day battle, what remained of the combatants parted. King Pyrrhus’ army was toast. Depending on who you asked, the Greeks won. But Pyrrhus’ once mighty army had been gutted and Pyrrhus wasn’t a dumbass. He knew he’d blown it. He was miserable.

He’s famously quoted as saying: “If I achieve such a victory again, I shall return to Epirus without any soldier.”

That’s a Pyrrhic victory, a battlefield “win” that’s so costly that you lose the war. 2,300 years later, Pyrrhus is remembered for “winning” so bad he lost. That’s his legacy. Ouch!

Incidentally, Pyrrhus really did “lose” the war with Rome. He left the Italian peninsula in search of a weaker foe. Notice the lack of a third option? Pyrrhus couldn’t or wouldn’t return to Greece and live like a peaceful man. So he went to Sicily and spent the next three years killing soldiers from Carthage. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Let’s return from Pyrrhus’ colossal face plant to the fuse that was lit at 3:00 am EST November 4th 2020. In their reckless haste to unseat Orange Man Bad, there was no “turnback point”. Nobody was capable of (or willing to) say “ok folks, this isn’t working, two record vote counts at once is going to stink to high heaven”. If the cheat was a tightly run ship managed by reasonable adults they might have said “fuck it, we’ll try again in four years with that human brick Pence.” They didn’t. Plans that might have crunched a weak contender like Bush Jr. weren’t calibrated to Trump’s massive support. Maybe nothing could have been big enough. Trump could create an instantaneous boat parade by raising an eyebrow and pack a stadium with a wink. That’s not a guy you can defeat with backroom deals and a few profoundly influential votes stolen her or there.

So, they threw the kitchen sink at it; all of which leaves tracks later. A broken water main in Georgia. Sketchy midnight truck deliveries in Michigan. Simultaneous stopped counts for no reason. Counts that continued after the staff was sent home. Strange goings on with numbers; negative votes, oddly balanced binomial distributions, non-integer votes, manual adjudication of hundreds of thousands of votes, visual barriers on windows, a shitload of IT traffic from machines that are supposedly not on-line, the list is long. According to the press, only a terrorist motherfucker would complain but nobody’s that blind.

Would we accept that kind of crap elsewhere in life? Would we let the IRS pull strange numeric shenanigans when deciding a tax rate? Would we let a babysitter watching our children tape up the windows so you couldn’t see? Would you ignore a strange truck pulling up to your garage at 3:00am? Would you ignore your computer making unknown connections to unknown entities for unknown reasons? Of course not. We’re not idiots. We expect certain behavior and if we don’t see it we know we’re getting shafted.

Nobody on planet earth would buy a used car sold under the same appearances as the 2020 election.

Insisting we shut up and accept the unbelievable is unwise. It’s creating tension. There is the true thing that happened. There is the thing we’re told. The further apart they get… the worse it feels. The worse it feels, the more unstable everything gets. The more unstable it gets, the more I think the rush to unseat Orange Man and replace him with Mr. Potatohead was a bad decision. I think it’s going to go down as a Pyrrhic victory. Biden’s ignored by virtually everyone, nobody likes Harris, nobody believes the vote tallies, Trump isn’t gone, and overall… it doesn’t feel “over”.

“You can feel the tension beneath the surface, the sense that something is coming, a great changing.”

Yep.

“You can see the signs and hear rumblings out there. You can feel the growing anger. … It’s not clear what’s going to happen, but this mess is unsustainable… So, enjoy this coma before the storm, because the storm is coming.”

Bingo! Incidentally, I’m not tying some secret meaning to the word “storm”. Q isn’t coming out of his spaceship to fix everything. It’s going to be something we haven’t yet defined. Something big and unexpected and weird and ideally sourced from the people. I’ve got no idea what the fuck will happen. You don’t either.

All that’s sure is “suck it up buttercup” isn’t a long term strategy. It was a bad idea and it’s working less every day. Nor is stomping on opponents going to smooth things over. You cannot beat a man enough to make him love you.

Something unexpected is around the corner. Everyone predicts the worst. Oddly, I don’t.  I’m hopeful it’s not going to suck too bad. Right now is the time of foreboding. It’s that vague rumbling your gut you feel after washing down a bad burrito with half a bottle of tequila. Something’s going to happen. Maybe it’ll come up, maybe it’ll go down… but it’s not staying where it is now.

A.C.

P.S. A personal note: I’ve been getting in lots of “outdoor recreation” time. 2020 had me in stasis but COVID is now a chain that only binds the woke. I’m camping and sailing and fishing with great joy. I’m loving every minute but it’s not all smiles. It has the bittersweet feel of “take this vacation before the next situation hits like a whirlwind”. I’m not alone. Lots of fellow outdoorsmen have the same attitude. We’re all gleefully chasing trout or whatever but there’s an almost universal understanding that we just don’t know what the future holds. Get out and have fun. The fuse is already lit. You didn’t light it, it’s not your fault, and there’s no stopping what comes next anyway, so get in some fishing while you can.