It is a lovely morning in Virginia’s placid Piedmont. Night had been good, the full moon fading and a rare streak of a falling star brightening a night of changing weather. Rains also came overnight, and the greenery that surrounds us is shaking off moisture with determination. The Lady in Red on the flat-screen dolefully informed us it would be warm again, and humid. A return to seasonal norms, she said, and as someone else said, with a sigh, 37 days until we complain about how warm the Fall is going to be.  

There is other stuff happening, of course, just starting as the seasonal warmth slows otherwise normal activity. Our Commonwealth stages its elections by decree of the Legislature. Traditionally, it is an off-cycle process contrasting with the even-year national cycle of events. Thus, we are already in an electoral campaign most of you can ignore until next year.    There will be some preludes to the themes that will be played out next year with the full attention of the National Media. Those would be the folks who are held in higher (or lower) contempt than the usual bands of suspects.   

It is interesting. Polling on public policy and candidates has taken some well-deserved flak since the 2016 election cycle, with some estimates claiming there is a 4% sample error favoring progressive issues. That may seem like a fairly minor issue, but the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford found that the U.S. ranks lowest in media trust out of 46 countries. Their poll (which I would note is already suspect) ranked American trust in the media at 29%, lower than in any of the other 45 countries surveyed.  

News consumers in Finland, the leader, report trusting their media at a rate of 65%. Of course they all speak Finish, which shows you the higher level of difficulty in just saying things like “Good morning.” Reuters also found a drop in “interest in news” in the U.S., and appended their findings with the notation that we are “a special case.”   

The Loading Dock gang agrees with that around the fire-pit, since we already have special news aplenty in the Piedmont. We are all, at least temporarily, resident in a Congressional district whose votes are tabulated by machines produced by the Dominion Voting Systems company. So, we are not quite sure who we actually voted for. But we still have interest.   

The Commonwealth has a law prohibiting our Governors from running for re-election, so we get relief from some of the entrenched lunacy that goes with incumbency. Our current State Chief Executive is a licensed medical doctor, which seemed to be a welcome addition to leadership in the midst of the Greatest Medical Threat in history. 

Being in relative seclusion on Refuge Farm, our view may be distanced from the same reality shared by many Virginians. We live, by intention, just south of the border with the megalopolis of Laws that encompasses the city that shaped our careers. It is coming this way, even as some of our counties to the west grumble about it and talk of joining West Virginia, which is a product of other startling developments in our civic history.   

We face it again with our crop of Gubernatorial candidates. One of them apparently played basketball as a young man, according to his ads. The other better known candidate has actually already been the Governor. He is an affable fellow we used to listen to on his weekly radio broadcast Up North. Seems like a fun guy, and used to be one of the money bundlers for the Clinton family philanthropic enterprise.  

That would be enough for legal proceedings in many other jurisdictions, but that is what life is like on the border between an older America and the one they are manufacturing in DC.  

So, despite the Reuters poll, we are interested. There is already talk about restricting our movements, mandating lock-downs and face-masking for a deadly new variant of the last plague that had a survival rate of only 99%. The crowd commenting are partly vaccinated, most have one or more co-morbidity factors but have joined the fight for public health by agreeing to only smoke outdoors.  

The supposition is that hanky-panky for the coming elections will be enabled by another round of mass mail-in ballots based on outdated voter rolls and without chain-of-custody controls. That is a matter of interest, since we hope even the media will take a closer look at what is going on with the voting and the counting.  

But of course, we are prepared in case the current Governor decides to rule by emergency decree and order us to not leave the property and put on those masks again with all those old germs. We tentatively scheduled a vote on whether we wanted to comply, but there was no demonstrated level of interest in anything but permitting open air activities including beverage service at the fire pit by the Loading Dock.   

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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