Editor’s Note: a NSFW image concludes Marlow’s Election Day Essay. You can save yourself from seeing the expletive if you just read the lucid words and quickly hit the exit button as you get further on and see the top of the colorful image. You might go vote.

– Vic

08 November “Election Day” 2022

Election day’s today. This exclamation is the political equivalent of the recent Chewy TV commercial Saint Bernard Ralph’s ‘s “Peanut butter box is here.” Too bad it’s appropriately a frustrating finale of fake and partial conclusions that’ll leave us no closer than we ever were to identifying a single viable solution or way forward — just another in the endless series of fact-, logic-, gluten-, dairy-free but decisively keto teases of unnecessary faux confessional appetizers. Foolishly uninventive, reverse-engineered pseudo bright ideas and dodges of hard realties based on their poorly polled knowledge of voters’ quirks du jour.

All I can say to the suckers voters is “This was never about us.” Hell, they’d tell us without batting an eye lash, even on our deathbeds, that we’re good and deserving folk with wonderful families . . . but the other side wouldn’t play ball, It was always about their houses — or more explicitly them being allowed to stay in their jobs and where they’re living at in metro DC. So, alas and alack, this was about the Usual Suspects — storytellers, problem detectives, solution conjurers, and secret culprits. They claim that they’re trying to free us from what has become our own self-perpetuated torture and convince us of their personal and their ideas’ irresistible allure.

They endlessly schemed their way initially into their houses and then became forever insane about soon being driven out by flood tide of rejection scheming by the other side. They’re simple wet-finger-in-the-air Watchers. Either way, new families move in and find themselves surrounded by weirdo wants and desires provided by their ceaseless polling that’s either damning or kind of moving and charming in a Hollywood B movie way. In the final moments of our Republic’s sainted day, we see them all in turn, staring at the two mall buildings in the background shots of the day’s closing cable TV news programming — the White House and the Nation’s Capital — and their latest albeit temporary controller interviewees. They should be honest and tell us the real names the call us — yikes, it’s Johns. Even were we do try driving them out and leave them in the dust, we’d steadfastly refuse to see that they’re always trailing us the entire time via our social surveillance state apparat.

In reality despite winning, these Watchers will always leave their supporters’ issues mostly unresolved. They want to preserve a winning formula for their later use. If we’re expecting a “Get-er-done” moment, we should dutifully be but will not be exasperated. Long ago we should have learned a lot about ourselves and our fellow citizens. We’re self admittedly broad yet shallow creatures/characters. Some might say our endlessly repetitive voting booth behaviors serve as metaphors for the contemporary plagues of surveillance, competition, greed, jealousy, bigotry, and paranoia. Collectively, they’re a microcosm of a culture that tells us to mortgage every aspect of our lives in order to attain the trappings of wealth and fame without effort or sacrifice. So, it makes sense to say that, on a thematic level, all of us are Watchers, even largely those of us who’re well-meaning people. Why else wouldn’t we want anyone else to see what levers we pulled? Oops, let that big cat outta the bag, my TicTok’ers.

Well, maybe, maybe not, for this spelling bee champ

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