Divide and Conquer

In 7^th grade at Our Lady of the Catechism school, back when the streets were full of Vietnam War protesters and LBJ was deciding he wouldn’t run for a second elected term and my Dad stood in the living room staring at the TV with his hands on his hips and shook his head and said, “Well, I guess we have to settle for Tricky Dick,” because he certainly couldn’t vote for HHH, and Mom just shook her head and went back to fixing dinner, the gender split in our classroom was 36-14 in favor of girls, and our teacher, Miss Wackgeob, decided it would be a good lesson for us to have an election for class officers.

She used to have lots of ideas, but she struggled in execution.  Once, she brought two big bags of individually wrapped taffies, you know the ones wrapped in a little piece of wax paper in earth tone colors like brown and foam green and granite and rust, to give out as awards for students who stayed on task, only she didn’t realize giving sugar to 12-year-olds was not a spot-on strategy for ensuring focused behavior.  When she figured it out, weeks later, she put the two big bags away in the cupboard in back of the room that wasn’t being used for coats and lunch pails, and because I sat in the back, I used to get up and walk over to the cupboard while she was writing on the black board and grab a handful of taffies to distribute to my friends, and then the classroom would get fidgety, and Wackgeob would get harried, and it was weeks and weeks later that she finally went back into that cupboard and noticed the taffy supply depleted. No way to pin it on me, but I‘m sure she strongly suspected.

So anyway, the election. We were going to elect a new Class President each month until the June primary at the end of the school year. It was clear to me that, if steps weren’t taken, we were going to have a girl as Class President each month, which meant forever, and in those pre-women’s lib days we couldn’t have that, so I got my boys together during a break in kill-the-man-with-ball and we laid out a plan.  Each month, we were to nominate 1 boy to run for President. We would also nominate at least 3 girls, and if a girl nominated a second boy (it never happened! I knew it wouldn’t, but even then I believed in risk mitigation plans), we would nominate 3 more girls. Then we would vote along rigid gender lines.  It was not until the 4^th month that the girls caught on and nominated 2 boys (OK, eventually it did happen.) and we got whomped 36-7-7, and then Bobby got shot the day after we all went to see him at the Valley Mall and Tricky Dick got elected and everything got changed.

4 years later, Tricky Dick got his boys together and concocted a plan to have the opposing party nominate a candidate who was so far left he had no chance of winning, and then Tricky Dick trounced his opponent in the election by the 6^th largest electoral college margin of all time (Trump’s margin was 46^th out of 58) and there were still protestors in the streets.  Then it came out that Tricky Dick and his boys had concocted a plan that was illegal, or at least they concocted it illegally, and there were more protesters in the streets,  and then he didn’t get to be President any more.

So today it comes out that “The Russians,” who we feared and vilified back in those taffy days, are suspected of trying to disrupt our democracy by helping 45 pick his opponent and that, Surprise! Surprise! they are encouraging 45 to favor The Socialist and they are helping to promote The Socialist, and 45 gets all paranoid when this comes out in public when he didn’t squeal about it at all 3 weeks ago when it happened, and I’m thinking he either didn’t read the briefing or nobody told him back then, and so he shoots the messenger and replaces him with a guy who knows how to keep his mouth shut and in 2 days Nobody. Will. Be. Talking. About. This. because every day it’s some new horror and the defense can always be “What’s wrong with that? You’re just a Never Trumper.  Witch Hunt! No President has ever been treated worse. What about when Crooked/Sleepy/Mini …?” and there are no protesters in the streets because the economy taffy has our teeth stuck together.