By Beau Elliot
So I was going to vote for/endorse Donald Trump. It was going to be a wonderful joke. Well, except that humor is lost in this world; humor doesn’t have GPS, it turns out.
Well, OK; if I were the next-to-last person on Earth, I wouldn’t vote for/endorse the Trumpster. In the Republic of Wild Grasses and Cockroaches (as a New Yorker article put it sometime in the ’80s, not that I remember that decade; I was a musician and in love, which I don’t remember, either).
Meanwhile, back at the narrative, such as it was (I have trouble with narrative, including I don’t believe in it; it’s too much like having allergies; sneeze, blow the nose, repeat), if Trump and I were the last two people on Earth, I wouldn’t vote for Trump.
I’d vote for the cockroaches.
But, being a selfish and self-absorbed writer (are there any other kind?), Trump as president would be perfect. Material, material, material, every day without fail. Trump as president would be a perpetual material machine. As a writer, you just lean back and take dictation.
And if nothing else, the Trumpster knows how to dictate.
Also, there’s his hair. Well, he calls it hair; I like to call it Strawberry Fields Forever. (Thanks, Beatles.)
And there are his supporters, who see themselves as grass roots and devoutly believe the Trumpster is grass roots, too.
With all of his towers and hotels and resorts and golf courses, not to mention the mansion, Trump is about as grass-roots as a Martian. Ain’t no grass on Mars, last I heard.
But, oh, well. These are these days, such as they are.
And because these are these days, of course FBI Director James Comey just had to jump into the election 11 days before Election Day.
In a very confusing way, we must admit; here’s his letter:
“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.”
We don’t know what investigation Comey is talking about; the Anthony Weiner sextext investigation? Is he reopening the Clinton investigation? We don’t know.
What is more amazing is that Comey wrote that letter to Congress, and the world, before the FBI had a search warrant to actually investigate the emails. Meaning, of course, that the agency had no idea what was in the emails. (Numbering 650,00 according to reports. Who has 650,000 emails? Is that grass roots?)
What is clear is that dozens of prosecutors, both Democrat and Republican, have condemned Comey’s move. Some officials have said he violated the Hatch Act.
In any case, this election season has been so, well, weird, that if you tried to write a political thriller just detailing what has gone down, no publisher would touch it. Publisher, hell; no agent would touch it. Too unbelievable, they’d say. Never could happen.
Um, yeah.
Meanwhile, as the Trumpster runs around the country railing about a “rigged election” (you’ll notice it’s only rigged when he’s behind in the polls), an Iowa woman who supports Trump has allegedly been caught voting twice. Which is what we call voter fraud.
According to reports, she was afraid her first vote for Trump wouldn’t count. Because the Trumpster has been running around whining about a rigged election.
Oh, well. Some days, a Republic of Wild Grasses and Cockroaches doesn’t sound so bad.