I awoke Sunday with the distinct odor of our state's asshat Democratic Party leadership burning rubber as they roasted their tires trying to back up from their gleefully condescending assumption that their support for Hillary would go mostly unchallenged in the recent caucus. Late conversations - as recently as last Thursday - with members of the Dem cognoscenti - had left me a little unsteady as it was brought forcefully home to me that I am staggeringly off-kilter in my quiet enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and his mesmerizing, curmudgeonly-but-spot-on-the-fucking-target populist ongoing lambaste of the Democratic Status Quo Ante.
For many years our elected - and unelected - party elites have coddled their constituencies like berserk yogis hoping to refine their novitiates' downward dogs without being told that the act of polishing their turgid and appalling members against unsuspecting lycra'd bottoms is a nasty distraction and a crime. We have been offered the same slate of wan and febrile apparatchiks who, like the Soviet-era functionaries that spawned the very word as soon as the train with Lenin's body pulled into Clara Zetkin station, have offered us really little more then their repackaged ambition and stunningly empty imaginations every cycle since Ramona Barnes still clobbered unsteadily around Juneau in her confusing pantsuits and reeking beehive.
Once we make the determination that "This Ends Now," or at the least "Can we please have an opportunity to discuss why it may not be in our collective self-interest to continue pretending that a candidate utterly boughten by Bear-Sterns or whomever the fuck can actually provide progressive leadership," where do we go? I'll waffle a bit here. I'm not sure. Is there a collective will to flip the table and scatter the chips? Because that's what we're asking for, isn't it? A re-deal? With un-marked cards? And if we have constituted a primary system that can be commandeered by Super Delegates that render any real challenge to the anointed moot, then what's the point? I do know that if I catch one more of these cocksuckers giving a tug on their Yale or Stanford tie as they mumble sotto voce to one more grinning, stoop-shouldered "advisor" without a permanent Alaska address, I can't be responsible for the results. I do know that the Model .870 is still in the shed.
Okay, Pat C. tells me that kind of talk is hyperbolic. He points out that while he understands violent impulses may welter up from deep within the atavistic structures of brains traumatized by the miasmic exhalations in confined spaces of IBS-prone pundits, hinting at them will place you on watch lists worldwide. His point being that despite the possibility that punishment may be warranted for certain of the cretinous Hoi Polloi, I am the last person who should be meting it out, and in fact should, in the interests of a more general public safety, be the first one subjected to the rough justice I allude to. He is sensible in most things, is in fact I admit probably right in this case. Forget the gun. i probably don't have any ammunition for it I'd trust anyway since except for a single bellicose exchange during an imaginary assault by Fish & Wildlife on my beach I haven't fired it since 1998.
Putting that aside. Really. Consider instead the actual next 4 months, nationally and here at home. In my zipcode, it will mean that as I watch my boys slip around on the wet grass and untended dogshit that constitute my lawn in the soft mosquito-buzzing glow of a warm sub-Arctic evening spent in the company of my well-heeled neighbors (surgeons on all sides. Its a long story how I came to this block.) there are certain auguries we will be compelled to heed. Maybe not while drunkenly defending the ACA to the rigorous half-Finn across the fence, (His other half is Swedish. What can you do? He grows stupid when he drinks too much but retains the ability to remain vertical. I don't) but certainly in the morning when the pounding headache insists on bringing matters of greater moment into focus. Matters like Alaska's Superdelegates to the National Convention. Someone can tell me what this is all about please. I get the sense that if I were a Republican I would be thanking my stars that such a thing exists because apparently its through this untouchable class of the unaccountable that the GOP hopes ultimately to stave of Trumpy McTrumpface at the convention, relying on an inconclusive first ballot to free up the dumbkopfs who evidently thought it a nifty gag to pledge their primary count to Herr Trumpenstein as an expression of the Conservative weltschmeer-laden zeitgeist. By queering the first go-round into a non-majority, the GOP SDs can free the rest of their tacky campañeros to collectively whoopsie their support away from the abyss and park it up the derriere of something more resembling Homo Sapiens, conceivably delivering the world from a four-to-eight-year reign of terror and a resurgence of widespread LSD abuse devolving into riotous Key Parties co-hosted by the Anchorage and Glenallen Assemblies. Its ridiculous whether Alice Rogoff attends or not.
Returning to the point, insofar as one exists; Who created Super Delegates? Kal-el's father, whatsisname? Is there some bloke in an unobtanium jumpsuit striding purposefully through strip malls across the land handing out specially-emblazoned "Super Delegate" tchotchkes that grant recipients enhanced powers? Turns out, no. But kind of. There's a nomination/selection process that most voters are unaware of. I for one can't blame them if average schmos start glazing over as the "rules they agreed to," archly referenced, are bruited about breathlessly by dispirited hacks. I was scolded earlier this week by internet doyens shaming Bernie Sanders fans for bailing from the caucus site before the Super Delegates were properly chosen. They were tsk'd for seeing the day's job only half-done. Like when your accountant berates you for failing to file some obscure schedule related to the disposition of the step-mother's corningware you gave away at your last garage sale. Its like, "who knew?" Ignorance being, of course, no excuse.
But go ahead, look up the numbers if they haven't already polluted your inbox, Facebook and Twitter feeds. Near 80% of Alaskans who caucused chose Bernie Sanders, yet more than 75% of the state's Superdelegates have stated their intention to support Hillary Clinton at the convention. This phenomenon is playing out in each of the states Mr. Sanders captured last weekend, and indications are that it will continue in the upcoming remaining primaries. As one SD asserted - I paraphrase, because I can't be bothered to look up the exact quote; you may feel free to - "Hillary is the best choice for America." Mmm-hmm. And not instituting gun reform is what keeps this country free and your fellow citizens safe. Oh, and $7/hr is an adequate wage to support you and your children. Lordy. Paternalistic much? In any event, the Superdelegate count knocks the math askew. The other stat of significance at this point is that were the Superdelegate count to reflect the Sanders margins in the primaries he's carried, he would be leading Mrs. Clinton. So I hear. But I'm not a reporter, and I've no doubt there is fuzzy math out there that says the opposite. I admit to utter mystification though. Where and how did this system originate? In a very real sense it is awesome: Someone, some panel (Election Death Panel? Minority Rule of the Benighted Majority Panel?) had the foresight to provide the Doomsday Failsafe mechanism for when election results fail to land within the very narrow acceptable spectrum of outcomes. Outcomes that underwrite the creaking, paralyzed status quo that is hell-bent on your shrugging it all off and resuming your place, jostling at the trough of pigshit slops you've been force-fed since you acquired your first credit card. Go get it folks. They want to ring the dinner bell for you again, enfolded in their smugness, tone deaf to their abysmal platitudes and, apparently, blind to responsibilities that have accrued during this chaos to assure we are represented fairly.
I should move on to a different topic. But before I do I want a show of hands: Toss the entire fucking table, plus the dealer, and set the new one with our own utensils? Or set on our greedy hands and continue to jostle one another in the ongoing crusade to get our collective yawning maws under the dangling worms in the beaks of the glossy and demented crows when they flap noisily back to the filthy nest? Just curious.