Joe-bi Won, our only hope.

The world is an absolute shitshow. Can a decent man that’s made some of the decisions that got us here rise to the moment?

On November 4th 2008, I was drinking extremely good scotch, out of the bottle, with an exceptional human being. 5th Avenue in Park Slope had erupted in celebration. Barack Obama’s election felt like joyous catharthis.

After a decade of watching spectacular violence, callous incompetence, and breathtaking greed, it seemed like we fixed it. A black man with electrifying oratory skills, delivering a message that we were going to end the madness. Everything was going to be ok. He got this. We went back to brunch, we edited our top friends on myspace, got used to the iphone, and went to techno parties in warehouses that absolutley contained asbestos.

We checked out.

Politics was over, except it wasn’t.

There was a small well financed group of reactionaries that would lay the astroturf on which idiots in tricorner hats would march around Outback Steakhouse parking lots with machine guns.

It is with a deep sense of regret and embarrasment I have to admit: Hillary Clinton was right about Obama’s lack of expirence. His 4 years in the senate were not enough to instill the grim meat hook reality of governing. In theory Joe Biden should have been his Virgil, guiding him through the 13th level of the inferno, where the punishment is looking at Mitch McConnell’s face for eternity. The problem was both men were good cops. Obama didn’t have his Nixon or Johnson. Someone to tell him to put down the carrot and pick up the stick. I married an Indian woman, they do not have that problem.

Time and again concessions were made to a republican party that had no interest in compromise. It was only in his lame duck session did Barry figure this out.

The rest should be pretty fresh: a combination of genuine anxiety over income inequality, outright white resentment from increasingly senile baby boomers, and a stunningly bad campaign run by morons, for the most loathed democratic politician, led to the dumbest man ever elected in the history of Earth. A master manipulator, bully, and demagogue that only really accomplished three things: destroying the judicial branch for at least a generation, a massive tax cut, and the negligent deaths of at least a 100k of our mothers, fathers, sons, brothers.

12 years later, I’m again drinking very good scotch. The mood however, is not the same. Celebrations at the ousting of our big wet president were genuine, but not truly joyous. How could they be with a quarter million neighbors gone?

There’s talk about “healing” and bringing the country together.

But much more than healing there needs to be righteous defiance against all inequality, a determination to hold our politicians accountable, and empathy for people that have been left behind.

The hollers of Appalachia, long a democratic strong hold, need to be treated with cultural respect, and no, that doesn’t mean condoning the minority that are actual rascists. It means thanking them for the sacrifices that their families made by heading into those mines to power this country to the most prosperous in history. Asking how we can repay that debt, renewable energy seems like an obvious place to start.

It means making sure that black and brown people arent executed on the streets, and those locked up for drugs have a way into the coming cannabis boom. There wont be a better chance to lift as many people out of poverty in our lifetime.

With a COVID-19 vaccine coming in the next 6 months or so, our immeadate attention needs to be on climate change. Australia was on fire in January. The whole thing.

American imperaliasm should be dead. Normalizing relations with Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and the acknowledgment of the fundamental dignity of the Palestinian people are both practical and moral.

Police departments don’t need to be defunded, public services need to be refunded (with money from police budgets). Teachers need raises, cops need occasional pay freezes. The idea that government can’t do good things needs to die.

I loathed the idea of voting for Joe Biden, a decent man, but one that represents everything that has gone wrong with the democrats. That said, if anyone could be reminded of the importance of a well funded, strong, state….its probably Uncle Joe.

Have your brunch, have some mimosas. Then get ready to fight, because the guys storming your local Blimpie with Uzis are still here.