On 13 October 2024, I jaunted 20 minutes south down Interstate-5 to the Cosumnes Nature Preserve, whose toy swamp I used to visit with my parents and my daughter Lisa; they are all dead now, and so was my pleasure on that Sunday, thanks to a haze that looked merely dirty until I opened the car door and realised it was smoke again, more smoke, my eyes beginning to burn and my chest to ache: poor sad California! In recent years I sometimes wake up choking; is the house on fire? Oh, no, merely the planet.
One of my homeless Republican friends (who stopped speaking to me once he realised that I thought differently) used to explain that if we simply listened to the president (meaning Donald Trump, who by then was out of office), we would log our forests and solve that fire problem for good. Climate change was a Chinese hoax, he instructed; and so was the Covid 19 virus, of which (according to those lying socialist doctors) his ladyfriend died in his presence – preposterous!
Fortunately, 2023 had been tolerably breathable, and 2024 pleasant, aside from some unseasonable and therefore deniable heat. But now, after six astonishing weeks of air that managed not to stink like an ashtray, the sky was back to purple-brown again. Today’s heat (I mean its Chinese hoax) made the smoke more distressing, if perhaps only to me – for I confess to having gotten ‘sensitive’ thanks to pulmonary emboli, and pass autumn’s smokiest days with my face an inch from the air purifier, wishing I were somewhere else, whereas many of the neighbours barely taste smoke at all. More power to them.
I almost voted for her; I truly almost did
I stared at the almost motionless orange-brown grass, inhaling as shallowly as possible and feeling despair. Having neglected to bring my respirator (for in Sacramento the sky had been innocuous, thanks to the north wind), I took a few steps, trying to toughen up, wishing as usual to be somewhere else while cunningly rubbing my stinging eyes on my sooty sleeve. A live oak feebly twitched its greenish-grey foliage, which looked greyer than green. Up the road, cars turned dirty-coloured before vanishing into the dirty air. A car crept like an animated dirt-clot along a low wall of grey trees; and the sky glowed dirtier by the minute.
That afternoon, colour returned into land, water and sky. It always had, so far. Eschewing my liberal neighbours’ inflated swings between doom and triumph, depending on how their television channel portrayed that day’s politicking, I watched smoke come and go, read the paper’s bad news and filled out my absentee ballot.
In 2016 I had strolled to my polling place wearing my most au courant T-shirt: NIXON’S THE ONE. The sweet old lady who showed me where to sign in her book remarked: ‘Sir, I have a feeling your candidate’s not going to win.’ ‘Oh, well,’ said I. My father used to advise me that all one can do in elections is vote against. I was not in love with ultra-hawkish Hillary Clinton, who by the way promoted fracking in Central Europe. On the home front, she pronounced half of Trump’s followers a ‘basket of deplorables.’ My patiently impoverished, God-fearing, coal-loving West Virginian friends did not much like that. As for Trump, he not only revelled in fossil fuels but kept interrupting Hillary and baying: ‘Lock her up!’ He disgusted me more than she did, so I voted for her.
After four years of ham-handed authoritarianism and brazen corruption, Trump lost to Joe Biden, tried to corrupt the certification, instigated a riot at the Capitol and spent the next four years pumping sewage into Republican skulls. Biden meanwhile devolved into an ever more feeble figure – almost appropriate for the Weimar Germany of 1932. His painful performance in the debate against Trump, who rightly told the cameras: ‘I don’t know what he’s saying and I don’t think even he knows what he’s saying,’ boosted Trump. It relieved me when the old fellow finally vacated his candidacy in favour of Vice-President Kamala Harris.
I almost voted for her; I truly almost did. She was incomparably more decent than Trump. And why not a black woman president? Wasn’t this America, the Land of the Free?
But in the debate between that ‘progressive’ candidate and Trump, the latter simply (and characteristically) ignored the moderator’s question about climate change, while Kamala assured Pennsylvanians that she had changed her mind and now favoured fracking and suchlike ways of making America great again. We might as well have had Hillary back! My Democratic friends said: ‘No, Bill, she’s just saying what she’s saying so she can get elected. You have to vote for her!’ I interpreted that as meaning: ‘Bill, you just have to hope she’s lying.’ That wasn’t good enough for me.
In the very close 2000 contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush, citizens who chose the third-party candidate Ralph Nader were blamed for throwing the election to Bush. Fortunately, California’s electoral votes were practically guaranteed to go to Kamala, so I decided on the Green party; all I could hope to do was express my opposition to more of the same, which was on the road to killing us. Whether Kamala won or lost, if enough people voted as I did, maybe there would be some kind of change for the better, not that I believed it for a microsecond. Meanwhile Trump, having disposed of the Chinese hoax, was promising deportations and concentration camps.
You see, I am a single-issue voter. My dear friend Dave, who is a Jewish Republican and an active member of the National Rifle Association, is another such. He believes that if the Jews of Europe had owned more guns, fewer would have gone into Hitler’s ovens. That sounds logical, and may even be correct. In short, Dave’s issue is firearms ownership, which we associate more with Republicans than Democrats. I own fewer guns than he (less than half a dozen, and only pistols), but share his enjoyment of them as well-made machines, respect their power and am grateful for the peace of mind they bring me, as when, for instance, the hateful man whom I caught trying to break into my studio pounded on my wall all night, shouting very personal racist threats, and the police never came until morning. Dave, by the way, was the one who taught me I could not shoot unless the creep had at least one limb through the wall.
It was also Dave who warned me (as California never did) that a certain legally purchased 9-millimeter would soon send me to jail unless I surrendered it to the police (without compensation, of course). My Second Amendment right to bear arms is precious to me, culturally and morally. Dave likes to say that an armed populace keeps the government honest. To him, Trump is the pro-gun candidate, and therefore the right choice for freedom-loving Americans and not least for Jews. Dave and his family belong to a fairly liberal synagogue in San Francisco, so once Trump became president in 2016, the rabbi proposed a march to the local Holocaust Museum. When Dave objected, his family was disinvited to various bat mitzvahs and otherwise humiliated. In other words, Hillary types consigned them to the basket of deplorables. This man is one of the kindest, most intelligent and civic-minded people I know. He has changed my editor’s flat tyre, taken my daughter and nephew shooting (with a military rifle, of course), slipped me Cold War iodine for my first visit to radioactive Fukushima and found a vocational school in which to place a Thai child prostitute whom I kidnapped.
I disagree with some of his opinions, as does he with some of mine, but I love him nonetheless. When his daughter was born, I took him to a stripper bar, and a young lady leaned very close to him, widened her eyes, and inquired: ‘Dave, don’t you wanna come see my room and play with my toys?’ To which he replied: ‘We need to finish talking about the gun-grabbers and the tree-huggers.’ That was Dave, who stood loyal to his single issue against spider-eyelashed temptation.
My own single issue used to be torture. Hence after eight shameful years of Bush and Cheney, I voted for Barrack Obama, as did my father, who had been a lifelong Republican. ‘You know, Bill, they’re just mean,’ he said. ‘They want to deny services to legal immigrants.’ He survived his lymphoma long enough to see Obama elected, and we were both thrilled. But then Obama promised not to prosecute any bigwigs over our crimes at Abu Ghraib. More than 21 years after Bush’s Iraq War, which wrecked a faraway country and America’s reputation for the sake of a lie, I have given up on torture and fixate on climate change instead, hoping to achieve a comparable success.
Delightful Anabel, with whom I clinked shot glasses in a bar in Bakersfield, also in California, wanted Trump back in office
So Dave (who by the way disbelieves in climate change) will stick to his guns, and vote for Trump. Several of my black friends promise to do the same, because Trump, they tell me, is the friend of the black man, which reputation he won during the pandemic with his aggressive anti-vaxxing stance. Did you ever hear of the Tuskegee experiment, whose white researchers treacherously declined to cure the syphilis of their black research subjects, because they preferred to document the disease’s entire fatal progress? My black friend Lamont, who has been taking care of my alarm system for years, is one of those who cited Tuskegee while explaining why he had refused vaccination and would vote for Trump.
Although her parents had been illegal immigrants from Mexico, delightful Anabel, with whom I clinked shot glasses in a bar in Bakersfield, also in California, wanted Trump back in office, because he promised to close the border so that no more Latinos could emulate her parents, and thus maybe steal her job. My exterminator, Chris, who is white, seems pretty likely to vote Anabel’s way. He picks up decaying rodents with his bare hands, and he saves invasive raccoons, birds and possums whenever he can. He adores his girlfriend, for whose love he often expresses gratitude, and I have seen how wonderfully he fathers their children. He teaches me what the colour of cockroaches means, and I follow him around like a puppy. We are both self-employed, with money worries and ornery pride. In his crew I’ve met a Latino who will vote for Trump because ‘Nancy Pelosi is just evil’ – and, after all, Nancy (whose husband, was badly injured in his own home by a hammer-happy Trumpeter Swan) belonged to the same party as our Kamala.
On a 101-degree Fahrenheit day in October, with a 102-degrees forecast for the morrow (in other words, 38.3 and 38.9 degrees Celsius), I heard two of my fellow light rail passengers concede the possibility of climate change; one man even said the oceans were warming. And October went on being warmer than Octobers used to be. A blue-collar right-wing neighbour of mine complained about feeling hot, and I reminded him that he could not be hot at all, because that was a Chinese hoax. And on 17 October (a miracle day of breeze untainted by smoke), my gay Asian neighbours came over to worry about the election again; they had a HARRIS – WALZ sign in their front yard. That night I called up my exterminator, who was with the family watching his daughter’s cheerleading performance, and he said he believed less and less of what the television and the government said; it was getting harder to know what was true. We made an appointment to poison more rats and go out for lunch, probably at the pizza place he liked, and I knew he would forgive me for voting against Trump. When Lisa died he gave me one of the bonsai trees he grew. I hope we will always be friends.
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