Electric Boogaloo
On Sequels
With the reality of a far-right parliamentary majority and prime minister bearing down on France, 25 left-wing parties recognized history’s darkest rhyme and united against a common threat to the principles of freedom and equality. Look at their joy: we gasped longingly. Look at all those young, beneficent faces glowing in defiant celebration! We could have that, too, if it weren’t for Creaky Ole Joe and his Enormous Ego! Right?
Wrong.
Developmentally speaking, America’s brain is somewhere between the ages of 18 and 21. Technically, it’s old enough to drink, vote, and get a driver’s license but remains shy of a full frontal lobe. It lacks complete executive function, is frequently impulsive, and often reckless. It is unable to rent the car many of us are attempting to remove President Biden’s keys from.
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In case you did not have the pleasure of growing up in America during the 1980s, Electric Boogaloo was a sequel pumped out nine months after the canon-worthy original masterpiece entitled Breakin’. Part Two was, by all accounts...not great. But it survives. I mean, here I am, forty years later, using it as a title for a goddamn Substack post.
We notoriously dislike sequels in entertainment, and what is a United States Presidential Election if not entertainment? Oh, you think it’s about our future as a democratic republic, about policies that will impact life in this country and around the planet for decades if not generations? Well, in that case, ya big babies, may I remind you that WE ARE PERFECTLY CAPABLE OF DOING OUR OWN VERSION OF WHAT FRANCE DID. How do I know this? Because we’ve done it already. Hello?
Bonjour?
Four years ago? Also, two years ago? Also, in several rather remarkable special elections? Also, every time abortion has been on any state’s ballot?
The toll of the scroll. Nothing sticks. I’ve mentioned this previously. I have to keep mentioning it because our collective container is now a sieve. We’re swiping left on whatever presents as immediately displeasing to our exhausted eyeballs. We need constant stimulation. It’s rewiring our synapses, messing with our memories, speeding up time. And it dissolves the essential nutrients of meaning before our famished spirits can metabolize them.
May I please remind you that several years before the French left defied their media’s near-certain predictions of defeat, we held our own fascistic tide at bay. When the race was called for Joseph R. Biden and Kamala D. Harris on November 7th, 2020, it was the single most communally joy-filled day I’ve ever experienced as a United States citizen or as a New Yorker, and I don’t claim either lightly.
Two years later, we transformed a presumptive Red Wave into an incontinent little dribble that depended on the victories of great statesmen like George Santos to be acquired. We held the Senate because Georgia, of all places, is legitimately turning blue, and we repeatedly voted against the twisted Christocratic fixation with controlling female reproductive organs any time there’s been a chance since this diseased Supreme Court overturned Roe, including in notoriously liberal bastions like Ohio, Montana, Kansas, and motherfucking Kentucky.
After that ill-conceived national embarrassment disguised as a Presidential debate, we went into panic mode. Understandably. Fascism is extremely scary, and fascism by way of Donald Trump, in addition to being extremely scary, is deeply stupid. However we, the actual people of this nation, have been effectively turning back the tide of Trumpist Fascism for the last four years, and the only way we won’t do so again this November is if we convince ourselves we’re incapable of it.
To be clear: I was in a panic after that shittastic debate, too.
If it had been up to me….ok, if it were actually up to me, Kamala Harris, who was my chosen candidate in 2020, would have won the primary, so she’d be President right now, which means the Beltway press would currently be in a different frothy pitch, about how her laugh is too annoying, her teeth are too white, her tone is too aggressive, her mood is too cheerful, her clothes are too purple and her husband is too Jewish to win re-election. (We eagerly await you, First Doug!) If it were up to me now? Joe Biden would willingly and gracefully retire on a record of progressive achievements unmatched since the Johnson Administration. Were it up to me, JB would’ve called a press conference shortly after the Stephanopoulos interview, and he’d have said the following:
You’re not gonna believe who I just got off the phone with, folks; that’s right, it was Lord Jesus himself, and he told me it’s time to turn over the keys to whatsherface; just pullin’ your leg, folks, I know her name, it’s Pamela. I’m kidding, It’s Ramma Lahma Dahmala. Got ya, again, didn’t I? Look. folks. Her name is Kamala Harris. She’s my Vice President, and I hired her for many reasons, but one of ‘em is because she’s a highly effective prosecutor. I mean, c’mon, Folks. Did you see how she dealt with Rapey McBeachWeek during that cursed confirmation hearing?? And what about when she smoked Jefferson Beauregard Sessions like a Jamaican blunt in the Senate Intelligence Committee, which, by the way, folks, I want to remind you we’re letting everybody on the pot charges out of jail. Point is, who better than a prosecutor to deal with a criminal? Who better than the former Attorney General of our most populated state to deal with Felonious Monk stuffing his pie hole full of Big Macs down in Palm Beach? He’s still got a bunch of our nuclear secrets shoved behind a toilet at his golf club, you know that, right? And look, folks, while we’re on the subject, sorry about the whole golf thing at the debate. What I should’ve challenged him to is a book contest. Like, how about reading one from start to finish, pal? I’m not joking around! A novella even. Short story. Limerick? Hell, I’d settle for a haiku. I can tell you right now Mr. Guilty 34 Times And Counting doesn’t know what in the sweet molasses a haiku even is. The fact of the matter, folks, is that golf is absurd. And by the way, I’d also like to apologize to the nation’s alley cats. Alley cats are good people, just trying to put food on the table. Believe me, I know.
My dad was an alley cat.
We can all agree Joe Biden will not say that or any approximation thereof, particularly following the more than competent and very defiant international press conference he completed last night. I’m proud to be a member of a political party open to having the discussion about whether he should step aside, though. I’m relieved most of us could acknowledge what we saw before our own eyes two weeks ago. Despite mainlining any documentary to even glimpse at the subject of cult worship, in my actual life, I very much prefer not being in one. I’m also glad my current President doesn’t take a shelf’s worth of Sudafed to convince people he’s a human being instead of an invisible accordion-playing clown id, like his opponent.
And while, as of this writing, our team’s pushback against the presumptive nominee hasn’t resulted in the type of dramatic plot twist American audiences crave—despite our fearless leader, Senator George Clooney, calling for his “friend” to quit the race by way of a New York Times Op/Ed instead of what one might hope their friend would do if they felt strongly about something related to our health or job performance which is, I don’t know, talk to them about it privately? Anyway. Between George’s written demands and Nancy’s broadcast skittishness, the drumbeat has only gotten drummier.
What I’m saying is this: There seems to me a not insignificant though still relatively remote chance Joe might let someone else drive us kids the rest of the way home. The keys are his to hand over, though, as they should be.
So now? If our ultimate goal is what we keep insisting it is, the complete defeat of Donald Trump and his cabal of petrifying totalitarian slendermen?
Panic begone.
Our job is to get behind the one ticket we’ve got:
Biden/Harris: Part Two.
Our job is to be the prosecutors of our own case, neighbor to neighbor, door to door. Our job is to make blisteringly clear all that’s standing between us and the continuation of our little democracy project is a willingness to show up on November 5th, 2024, and vote a straight blue line.
Please don’t take any of this from me. I’m certainly not taking it from me. I’m taking my cues from the women who have always shown up and to whom all Democrats were supposedly so indebted before. Because they saved us. Remember that whole backbone of democracy thing? If you expressed any version of this sentiment in previous election years but aren’t following their lead right now, you might be a little bit full of shit. Listen to those who did not and still do not have the luxury of dismissing Joe Biden as too tired or dull, too verbally unsteady, or halting in gait because their very freedom to move through the world without risk of grave bodily harm has always been directly threatened by the stated goals of a Trump regime.
Democrats remain the majority. We believe in civil rights for everyone. The majority wants its nation’s children to be housed and fed, for their parents to have paid medical and family leave, a livable minimum wage, and a healthcare system that prioritizes human hearts and minds and bodies over pharmaceutical CEOs’ bottom line. The majority wants to go through their days and nights without the cortisol-shattering fear of being shot at every possible location existing within our borders, including but not exclusive to bedrooms, churches, synagogues, mosques, hospitals, waiting rooms, grocery stores, malls, concerts, nail salons, movie theaters, amusement parks, nightclubs, farms, garlic festivals, military bases, and of course, any and all educational facilities from kindergarten through college.
The majority shares Joe Biden’s incandescent fury about the leading cause of death among America’s children now being guns. And if those of us in every state who neither wish to be hunted by secret police for seeking healthcare during a pregnancy or who do not find comfort in the hero-worship of a true despot like Vladimir Putin or an aspirant like Victor Orban, who did not appreciate the suggestion of bleach injections in response to a highly contagious deadly virus that killed over a million people —if each of those people were simply to vote in favor of the candidates whose policies would best represent them all the way down the line?
We would win.
Again.
We would win the Presidency, take back the House, and keep the Senate, too.
No one person will save us—not Joe, not anyone who may replace him, not even Kamala, should he ever lower those aviators and toss her the keys.
It’s on us—it always has been.
We have to prosecute this ourselves, no matter what.
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The night when images of jubilation and relief bounced from across the Atlantic off satellites floating in space and beamed their way back to our swiftly scrolling, twitchy-fingered souls here at home? The French electoral system is even more confusing than ours, but as I understand it anyway, the New Popular Front’s achievement of a parliamentary simple majority was only the beginning for them. You might call it Part One. The Far Right tide has ebbed over there, but they can still see it roiling in the distance.
As for us, wanting to keep the same sorts of waves from breaking too close to our shore?
We’ve got a sequel to deliver in 116 days, America.
Better get to work.
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I hear your call. And also must once again commend you on your absolutely spectacular writing. You’re like a triathlete there’s nothing you can’t do: comedy, profundity, calls to action. So eloquent, incisive, elegant. Bravo!
As always, brilliant!!!