Crazy at the polls
I can’t imagine that there’s anybody in this nation except for those too young or who have lost their minds that haven’t decided who they are voting for president on Nov. 3 yet. Even those who can’t vote have an opinion. As does the crazy lady singing Light my Fire off key outside of Sacred Grounds on 6th Street. On the one side you have a psychopathic narcissist spreading the coronavirus around the country in complete denial of the disease or its consequences and on the other side a reasonably normal guy who keeps getting slandered by the psycho and his minions.
This is probably the most critical election since George McGovern challenged President Richard Nixon in 1972, an election pinned to the decision of whether to end the Vietnam War. We are still having to cope with the consequences of that election and Nixon’s corruption of power. So if you haven’t watched the film The Trial of the Chicago 7, you should. It is a great American historical film written and directed by Aaron Sorkin and it is a reminder for those who happened to live through that time, and for those who came of age after it, just how little our country has come as far as justice is concerned.
Remembering is something we don’t do well, yet there’ll be plenty to recall from these last four years and even these last four weeks, that will fill many books, films and documentaries far into the future. You may just get to read or watch them if the Republicans lose the election big. If they win by some form of trickery via the electoral college and Supreme Court like in the Gore versus Bush election of 2000 then be prepared for book burnings and civil unrest.
Even though it’s a sure bet that former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris will take California’s 35 electoral votes by an overwhelming margin, perhaps the largest in history, it remains to be seen whether they can win in those “battle ground states.” The polls are guardedly optimistic. Just how it is that Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan, or even North Carolina and Arizona, became the deciding factors in choosing a president, I really don’t know. I keep hearing pollsters and political analysts explain this and the best conclusion I can come to is that in certain parts of America some people only get Fox News on cable.
Fox News and faux news websites help explain the existence of those toss up states and the presence of our own homegrown looney tune rightwingers in the Facebook group All Politics San Pedro. Yes, we have our very own brand of “true believers’’ here. Some of them, ironically, are members of the International Longshore Workers Union, whose motto is “An Injury to One is an Injury to All.” These few have politics that do not jibe with this ethic, as they tend to adhere to the “I’ve got mine, go get yours” attitude. Meanwhile, they scream at people like me as being “commies’’ on their page threads.
Isn’t it odd that a union founded by Harry Bridges, a man hounded by the FBI and Joe McCarthy for being a communist, ends up being inherited by a few libertarians? Luckily this isn’t the majority opinion among the ILWU rank and file workers or the vast majority of other labor unions in the rest of Los Angeles. From what I hear, these guys are barely tolerated.
Still, you’d think that in the towns surrounding this industrial port complex of Los Angeles and Long Beach that it just might be mandatory for the public high schools to teach labor history or maybe bring back Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana as essential reading for middle schools. This, however, is not the case and hence we have workers, some with college educations, that don’t even know their own history. Perhaps a brief history should be mandatory reading for every casual longshore worker before they get accepted into the union?
I digress though. What might be applicable from the history of the ILWU is how it was founded with a general coast-wide strike in 1934. It’s certainly the kind of event that grabs national attention. And if the Supreme Court, with its newly minted 6-3 Republican majority were to rule against the popular vote in this election, a legitimate response just might be for all workers to just not show up for a few days. We’ve seen the impact of what shutting down the economy can do to protect against a viral enemy. What would the average worker do to protect the republic against an infectious dictator?
As of last week, the LAPD has already begun making plans for containing the “civil unrest” if this election goes sideways. As of this writing, I received a press release from the Justice Department saying that they were dispatching the FBI to monitor elections in the seven counties of Southern California. I am sure it is the contingency plan all across this fine country. One might read many things into these “contingency” plans, but “Law and Order” would seem to be at the top of the list. The priority, however, should be to protect the vote, protect the polls and to defend justice – as this is the root of our democracy.