Minor healing madnesses: book crates, a shirt, and a GoFundMe in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

The election is five days away.

This year! This year, with Donald Trump squatting on my brain like a toad and turning me into a helplessly hair-trigger tolling bore!

Five days and it’s in the rear-view mirror. . . .

Unless the wrong thing happens. So close. . . . Think happy thoughts.

He could win, maybe. He could exceed the polls. Because there’s something different about Trump. Among his supporters online there is often a passive-aggressive sound - or a LOL U MAD BRO? sound.
Which has makes me think uneasily: No one, in the privacy of the voting booth, is going to be voting for Hillary Clinton because tee hee hee they think it would be funny or because screw everyone.

I actually got myself a T-shirt in honor of this year of the Trump tension. I think it may turn out to be a unifying generational symbol in America, like the smiley-face in the 1970s.

Here’s the link, if anyone wants one. (It’s by Jeph Jacques, who does the “Questionable Content” webcomic. Webcomics being another anodyne to use in dealing with an election like this.)

Yesterday, on impulse, I made an emotional sacrament. It will make my actual Christmas a moderate one, because I’ve sapped the fund, but that’s fine.

Every few years, to restore my soul, I have to do a Book Crate.

The book crates scatter back through my life like jewels. A book crate was the first step in winning me Gwen, although at the time neither of us knew that that was on the table.

The sane part, if anyone’s grading: How do you know if you’re giving anyone the right book, the right book meaning a book that will completely blow the recipient’s hair back and become a landmark in their imagination? (And that is what you’re going for. The very image of the landmark wonders in your own life.) You don’t know. You can’t. So the idea is that you use a shotgun approach. Something is going to hit. You get used books because that way you can afford more shot.

The insane part is everything else about it.

And, ohhhhhhh, I was due. Overdue.

This time was smaller than some. I used the room I had. And this time it was not a literal book crate, where I’ve accumulated the books myself, having any online orders shipped to me, and then I’ve wrapped the books individually in the best wrapping paper I could find (the most spectacular ever made use of a collection of old maps) and mailed them off in a single cardboard box that I could barely lift, let alone carry to the post office.

This time was just virtual - a lot of Amazon orders that will go to the recipient.
Early yesterday afternoon, a good friend said online that she was about to be out of reading material and did anyone have any suggestions? And I was off to the races, for once being able to afford to do so at the moment.

This time it could not come completely out of the blue; I had to ask her for her new mailing address. So she knows something. But she knows nothing.

When the Full Extent has become apparent, I think I will tell her that re-gifting is completely part of the plan. So she can then use any of the books that she has finished reading for Christmas presents. And so the bequeathal will continue on. I hope, I hope.

In the meantime, I get this period of fetishistic delight about the whole thing.
The invention of the transistor has turned out to mean that I can track the individual books as they wend their way toward Florida and make their final lock on their target. I will be checking my computer several times a day. There may be cackling.

And . . . late last night, after the house was dark and quiet . . . I went over the list and painstakingly, deliciously built a collage like a lunatic’s murder wall.

So, story.

A few weeks ago a North Carolina Republican headquarters was firebombed. Whoever it was spray-painted a threat on a nearby building: “NAZI REPUBLICANS LEAVE TOWN OR ELSE.”

I had been rigid for two days with what Donald Trump had been doing.

He had already been proclaiming the election to be rigged (well in advance of voting).
You don’t do that. Voter fraud is almost nonexistent (although Republican myth and message have insisted that it’s a huge problem), and it’s impossible to cheat on a giant nationwide election, particularly when the results are decidedly one-way by a large margin, as this one may still be.

And that’s not even the point. We have a game of pattycake going on here.
People need to accept the results of the election, accept the decision of their fellow Americans. Or this won’t work. That’s why losing candidates give graceful concession speeches. The delicate miracle of peaceful transitions of power in a democracy.

All this . . . democratic norms - more than that, the reasons for the norms - more than that, the good of the country in any respect not centering on Donald Trump and his pride and desires and fixations . . . falls completely outside of the scope of Trump’s dreamy drifty feeling-out-the-room eyes.

(This was before he told the moderator, in the final presidential debate, “I’m going to keep you in suspense” - about whether he would accept the election result if he lost. As if it was a reality show.)

Now, for the two or three days before that Republican campaign building was burned, he had been telling his supporters, in speeches, to vote on Election Day at their own polling stations and then to - not watch their own polling places - but travel to “other communities” (clearly communities with high minority populations and high likely Hillary turnout) and “watch” the voting there. To guard against cheating in those places.
And his angry, paranoid supporters at the rallies understood him perfectly.
They were proclaiming their intention to travel. One fellow announced that he would be “profiling”, looking for black people, Mexicans, Arabs, etc. and that he was going to get very close to them and see if they were “accountable”; he wouldn’t do “anything” illegal” but was going to make them “a little nervous.” (Yes, voter intimidation is illegal.)

And how might others behave - having been told by their Leader that the election was being stolen from them, and as much as told (and telling each other) that they might need to steal the election themselves in order to prevent that? With the division of absolutes that they saw?

I was thinking of this happening at polling places across the U.S. There are Republican and Democratic observers at all the polling places, if they see irregularities or interference they can complain to election officials; if that doesn’t work they can call party lawyers for legal action down the road - but it all sounded very formal, slow, and not really geared for something… mass.

And if the people in those “other communities” confronted and resisted these intimidating Trump “observers”, and that got on the news, how would Trump supporters interpret that? As “the shooting has already started”?

Not accepting the “rigged election” has more manifestations than this cross-community lurking during the vote. There was a lot of Trump-supporter talk of an uprising.

I was rigid. Yes. And I was thinking that, contrary to my former daydream of being able to relax once Trump’s poll numbers showed a reassuring drop, I wouldn’t be relaxing at all until Election Day. Or on that day.

I had worried about election outcomes before, but I had never felt frightened thinking about the actual day.

And then, this. A firebombed GOP headquarters in North Carolina. Apparently by someone on the Democratic/leftward side.

A spark?

Certainly Trump immediately tweeted that Hillary Clinton and her people were directly behind this.

Well.

A Democrat (I think a lawyer?) put up a GoFundMe and asked his fellow Democrats to pass the hat to collect $10,000.
This money to be used to repair the fire-damaged building for the North Carolina Republicans.

To stand up for democratic norms?
To show that this is not war, and show that a lot of us on our side know that it isn’t war?
To stand up for the system?
To show Americans standing up for America, as a contributing signal?
I jumped at it.

It was at I think $800 when I went into the site. When I had put in my credit card info and got to the “Thank you!” screen, the number was over $4,700. I had ridden the wave. I put in $25.

Lots of us left encouraging messages. Along the lines of “I agree with you about absolutely nothing, but this is out of bounds and I hope the perpetrators are caught soon and get the book thrown at them; meanwhile let’s get your HQ back on its feet”.

The GoFundMe was shut down forty minutes after it started, having collected over $13,000. $3,000 over the total.

Was this the right thing to do?

I hope so.

Rachel Maddow mentioned us on TV. She spoke well of us.

But . . .

Well, there was the possibility that the firebombing and threat was the brainchild of a fanatical Trumper idiot wanting to boost the vote. And I knew that when I gave.

But also . . . and I defended someone else in Twitter who was getting roundly attacked about this, and I proceeded to have two deeply unsatisfying arguments with very righteous people in which I convinced nobody:

A lot of people on the Democratic side said that we who had given were simply fools who wanted to feel good about themselves who had given money to help elect Donald Trump, and to help the North Carolina Republican Party, which has a particularly nasty record and agenda for fighting the rights of gay people and transgender people.

I countered - repeatedly - that paying a contractor to repair a building does not hand the Republicans any money to spend on campaigning. (In one sense it does, because the Republicans might have had to pay for the terroristically burned building themselves, or they might have had to make other arrangements that might been expensive - but that way lies war. Hey, wouldn’t it be great if another four buildings burned and they had to pay for those? Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch!)

But this counter of mine was weak in my own ears - because, as sensible as it may sound to me, I don’t actually know that the GoFundMe people are going to simply pay a contractor directly, although that’s certainly how I’d handle it. Maybe they will just give the money to the NCGOP.

And the people I was talking to completely rejected this distinction anyway.

(Meanwhile, to add real-world ambiguity . . . the day after all this happened, it was discovered that a nearby Democratic campaign building had also been vandalized, though this time there was only a spray-painted message, “DEATH TO CAPITALISM.”)

And my talk about the tension and sending a signal fell on mocking ears. No one in the present Republican party will hear it, they said. If anything, they’ll probably distort it into a new conspiracy theory faster than you can blink.
They were probably right.

I distrust how they were doing their balancing - they did not seem to me to be including the GoFundMe priorities in their balancing and deciding against them so much as not considering them at all - but they may be right about the whole thing.

But I’m glad I did it. True blue for “truth, justice, and the American way.”

And today I ran into a chapter that I don’t know how to edit. Almost the whole chapter. Appropriately, it’s chapter 13. I can’t even rearrange and massively recast. There are broken assumptions beneath the confusion. Maybe this evening I’ll skip to the next section without the problems and put in some work there at least while I try to think of what to do tomorrow, but in the meantime I’m just staring. I don’t think simply telling the writer “redo this bit” is going to work; my edit-feedback is giving him a pretty good training in the areas his manuscript tells me about, but I’m not sure he’s quite there yet.

I don’t feel superior. Hell, I didn’t put together a novel.

And I am so bone-tired. It was tiring to look back on that GoFundMe thing. When I did the non-book-crate I did the original batch on my list and then, while trying to hold myself back, I added a few drips and drabs for reasons (I remembered she’d said she liked period pieces) until with the last one added (one of Stephen King’s best but not his most famous, and she’s in Florida and it’s set in the Florida Keys, how did I not think of it?) I finally felt that click from “There Could Be So Much More” to “Ridiculous”. Then, as always, I could stop. And now I feel . . . proud and haggard, if that makes sense.

Someone asked an online question an hour or so ago: “Who is the best person you know?” I wrote,

You know, I don't know. I just know of a lot of people who have been trying. Maybe people have taken turns being the right answer.

I've met some people I wouldn't think are in the running. But that's all. I don't know anything, really.

And then I wrote, “But Gwen was amazing.” And she was. She really was. I think that would have done for the whole answer.

I found something I wrote exactly four years ago. I said:

Had a meltdown last night... with election stuff on the TV, it occurred to me that this election is the last one that Gwen and I will ever have talked about. She won't know about anything after this.

It's like history is drifting the two of us out of touch... You know, when part of the audience is out of the room I usually pause the movie. It's just polite.

Yes.

There is a rose-red and purple sunset glowing over the dark peak of the house house next door, deepening and deepening.

Last updated November 04, 2016