As I woke up this morning I vaguely remembered having some kind of dream about the US presidential election. As I lay there half-awake half-asleep trying to reconstitute it, this is what came to me:
The doorbell rang. The good news is that it wasn’t the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The bad news is that a pollster of indeterminate age, gender, and political affiliation, wearing a bright yellow Gallup for Precedent T-shirt with an Ipod tablet clipped to a clipboard, stood there looking bright and cheery. “Would it be all right if I asked you a question about the election?” I sighed and nodded.
The pollster looked me straight in the eye and intoned in a slightly singsong voice: “Supposing the election for President were held today, and the candidates were Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, which candidate would you vote for?”
“The election held today? What are you talking about? There’s no election today.”
“But if there were…”
“But there isn’t.”
“Just supposing that it’s today.”
“I can easily suppose that it’s today, because it is today. But I can’t imagine an American presidential election in late August.”
“Okay, let me rephrase that. Feeling the way you do today, supposing you had to pick either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, who would you vote for?”
“Neither. That’s like, ‘cyanide or arsenic?'”
“Okay, let me rephrase that once again. Supposing you had a gun to your head, who would you vote for, Trump or Harris?”
“Shoot…I dunno.”
“Supposing I pulled that gun on you right now, held it to your head, and said ‘pick Trump or Harris now or I’ll blow your friggin’ brains out.'”
“I…I guess I’d knock the gun out of your hand and kick you in the balls, supposing you have any.”
“Supposing I don’t, and your kick came to naught, and I grappled with you and body-slammed you to the pavement and got you in a choke hold and said ‘Trump or Harris?! Trump or Harris?!'”
“I would make inarticulate gutteral noises, since I wouldn’t be able to speak on account of your choke hold.”
The pollster sighed and said “I guess I’ll have to put you down as ‘undecided.'”
Now I have been called a lot of things in my time. But never, ever, had anyone, anywhere, had the temerity, nay, the unmitigated audacity, to call me “undecided” to my face. So I unloaded on him.
“Undecided? Undecided?! Who are you calling undecided?”
The pollster flinched and took a couple of backward steps. An alarmed look crept across his/her/its face as I emitted low frequencies at a high decibel level:
“Look at me! Do I look undecided? Huh? Undecided!! Hah!! C’mon, call me ‘undecided’ again. Feel lucky, punk? Just try it. ‘Un-de-CIDE-ed.’ Say it. Just say it.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“By calling me undecided you are implying that I am still trying to make up my mind whether to vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. You are implicitly accusing me of being perfectly capable of voting for either one of those cretins. Isn’t that right?”
“I…well, I—”
“You are insinuating not only that I might conceivably vote for a mobbed-up narcissistic sociopath with only the vaguest grasp of even one or two public policy issues, but that I might also vote for an empty-suit bimbo who would have been lucky to make Assistant DA if she weren’t a DEI whore fellating her way to the top. You seem to believe that I could somehow approve of either of these genocide cheerleaders and oligarch-suckers. You are insinuating that I might conceivably formally express my desire to enshrine one of these two mind-bogglingly disgusting individuals as the supposed supreme authority and formal head of state.
“So let me tell you how I really feel. Supposing that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris came to my door and put a gun to my head and said ‘vote for one of us, or else.’ You know what I’d do? I would disarm them and quickly squeeze off two shots, plugging one and then the other of those two treasonous war criminals right between the eyes.
“So go home and tell Gallup, and Freud and the Secret Service too while you’re at it, that I harbor a deep-seated repressed desire to inflict violence not only on these two nauseatingly despicable candidates, but on the whole vapid, utterly corrupt political system—and that given half a chance, I would not only put Trump and Harris out of their misery, but would do the same to pretty much every single member of the American leadership class, be they politicians or the oligarchs who own them.”
The pollster started fading out like Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat, leaving only a lingering trace of the look of alarm on his face, as I awakened from the dream and heard the doorbell ringing…
https://odysee.com/@WarStrike:a/Episode56:8
Balogh tells Striker that he doesn’t know who Roy Orbison is. In terms of “American popular culture”, this can be considered a horrendous educational gap. In view of his relatively young age, a forgivable shortcoming. Moreover, I cannot agree with Striker’s judgment that Orbison was prevented by Elvis, although he would have been entitled to the rank of the greatest American musician, even if Striker is right that Orbison would have been better off becoming an opera singer. Now you can also classify Striker’s out-of-fashion rockabilly hairstyle.
I would add that Orbison was, in truth, a thwarted crooner who nevertheless sang crooners, even if they were realized with the means of rock’n’roll. Orbison, endowed only with a lack of attractiveness, is pretty much everything I dislike. Apart from his material success and fame. And I don’t even mean his anti-star looks. His lyrics are only ever about being haunted by misfortune, losing the love of a woman or being practically existentially dependent on this supposed love like a baby that has not yet been weaned from its mother’s breast.
At some point in his prebuterine life, he must have stopped or even regressed in his mental and emotional development, which self-proclaimed experts misinterpret as “emotional depth”. Orbison’s “thoughts” constantly revolved around the central star Mutti, which was supposed to attract Roy, who had been thrown out of his “orbit”, by sheer gravity. And so he was constantly haunted by the feared blows of fate, which he attracted almost unerringly with his clinging fear.