Yesterday I had a plan. The plan wasn’t great but it was a plan nonetheless. We were going to Ikea to get three or maybe four things. To quote the good old Grateful Dead, “…it never works out the way it does in the song.” We got more than three or four things.
Going into Ikea is basically a trip from meatballs to madness. For us the meatball plate is front end loaded given the restaurant is right there at the start of the maze. The madness follows as you work your way from chairs to mattresses to kitchens to kid rooms to downstairs and clothing hangers, kitchen scales, plants live and plastic and the weird cinnamon buns.
One thing about Ikea, if you see a display with add on pieces or parts you like, get them all at once. When you go back three months later the display is gone and the specifically adapted parts are nowhere to be found. I was looking for cloth boxes to go into the closets we bought six months ago. The size I needed was no longer to be found although the display back then had lots of them around. Sigh.
I also wanted to get a heavy-duty clothing rack. The one on the website seemed a possible match to what I desired. Up close and personal it wasn’t. So, what to do? Well instead, we bought a kitchen scale, new sheets, a desk lamp, a flower stand, cloth shoe boxes that will be repurposed and pilsner glasses. Sigh. Between the baffling maze and the disorienting noodling of the piped in Scandinavian jazz I believe I was subliminally manipulated to buy, buy, buy. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “So it goes.” Oh wait, I did get pants hangers. They were on my list.
While in Ikea ran into a couple of other ‘Murican family units. Both were from California. The one I talked to at length had two kids of grade school age. He was in IT and she was a licensed psychologist, both of whom are remote workers. The IT guy I get, just give him a fast internet connection and he can work from anywhere. The psychologist is more interesting, obviously her practice is by teleconference. I used to do hearings every single day by teleconference. However, I think there is risk in a psychologist not living in the same land as her patients. One day she is going to advise someone to cool off and refocus, you know take a few deep breaths and then walk to the Mercado or …., oh wait I meant you favorite store. Oops. Hank or Hal Ketchum (I don’t remember his first name), the guy who did Dennis the Menace had a similar problem. At the height of the comic’s fame, he moved to Switzerland living there for several years. He knew he had to return to America when he found himself starting to draw Dennis’s father returning from work on a bicycle carrying French bread and a bottle of wine.
Later in the day I Facebooked, I read newsletters, and I watched some trashy TV. Of those three actions the one that was the most important was the reading. Will Bunch is a columnist for the Philly Inquirer. His article Journalism Fails Miserably at Explaining What is Really Happening to America https://archive.ph/haxhn is a must read for anyone who believes the US is worth saving. What he writes talks about how newspapers, TV and news websites are covering the current admixture of political races, criminal indictments and the purported tribalism in America in the wrong way. Mr. Bunch says this time the election is different, very different.
I urge you to read the whole article. The gist of it being the Republican party of old, the financial conservatives that acted as a balance to social program favoring Democrats no longer exists. It has been replaced state by state with diehard defiant Trump acolytes, people who no longer believe in democracy but rather in the cult of personality of Donald J. Trump. (See https://apple.news/A3DZI7L7hSam488dNwDigbg ). They worship an authoritarian who is waiting to be crowned something more than President. Covering this race like Kennedy/Nixon, Nixon/McGovern, Bush/Clinton, etc., is not honestly covering what is really occurring. This is a fight between democracy and an almost certain capitulation to authoritarianism should Trump win. I believe Bunch is correct.
I really, really urge you to read the whole piece. But here are Mr. Bunch’s concluding paragraphs.
“These are the stakes: dueling visions for America — not Democratic or Republican, with parades and red, white, and blue balloons, but brutal fascism or flawed democracy. The news media needs to stop with the horse-race coverage of this modern-day March on Rome, stop digging incessantly for proof that both sides are guilty of the same sins, and stop thinking that a war for the imperiled survival of the American Experiment is some kind of inexplicable “tribalism.”
We need to hear from more experts on authoritarian movements, and fewer pollsters and political strategists. We need journalists who’ll talk a lot less about who’s up or down and a lot more about the stakes — including Trump’s plans to dismantle the democratic norms that he calls “the administrative state,” to weaponize the criminal justice system, and to surrender the war against climate change — if the 45th president becomes the 47th. We need the media to see 2024 not as a traditional election but as an effort to mobilize a mass movement that would undo democracy and splatter America with more blood like what was shed Saturday in Jacksonville. We need to understand that if the next 15 months remain the worst covered election in U.S. history, that it might also be the last.”
This scares me. It should scare you too.
