I Don't Enjoy Tenterhooks

     Who does?  --Okay, presumably there's some perv out there who's into the metaphor, and loves being in suspense over serious issues that are likely to effect the rest of their life.  But that person's a statistical blip.  When it comes to our lives (as opposed to a mystery book or a spy movie), everyone wants to know what's around the next turn, or at least that whatever it is, it won't be too awful.

     Of course, we don't all have the same notions of "awful."  We don't even agree on what's going right and wrong at present, so the future and what do about it is even more contentious.

     As I write, the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election is up in the air, with the two major candidates within a few points of one another and the critical swing states hanging in the balance.  It's a good bet that it's going to stay a mystery down to the morning after Election Day, if not longer.

     I don't like it.  The main thing on offer right now is fear: Mr. Trump wants me to be afraid of "illegals," a category that apparently includes a lot of people who are in this country legally, but don't look like him or speak much English.*  He's also worried about Marxists, "transgenders" and a few other bugbears, all of whom constitute powerless (and often oddball) minorities with scary reputations.  It's a simple formula: wave around a few ooga-booga bogeyman pictures of Leon Trotsky, way-out drag queens, Stalin (not, strictly speaking, a Marxist) or the Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- or, better yet, of some actual criminals whose appearance makes them proxies for ethnic fearmongering.  It appeals strongly to his base, which encourages him to do more of the same, an iterative process that most recently resulted in a "few minutes hate" at rallies out West that would have been cartoonish were it not so unnerving.  I'd say this kind of thing is unAmerican, but our history is not without  low points, from the 1921 Tulsa race riots to 1954's "Operation Wetback" and its Depression-era predecessor that swept up and deported hundreds of thousands of U. S. citizens who happened to have the wrong accent or skin color, along with the undocumented workers and residents the programs were aimed at.

     The Democrats point to the Republicans in justifiable fear of precisely this kind of officially-supported xenophobia, and go on to relatively sober policy offerings: heartfelt, but Vice-President Harris and Tim Walz lack the lurid sideshow appeal of their opposition.

     Mr. Trump keeps finding new kinds of chickens to toss into the pot, promising skyrocketing wages, low prices and a whole slew of things no President or Congress can deliver; Ms. Harris offers a less flashy government of lower deficits, wider attention to human rights and less sloganeering.

     I don't know if that's enough.  I doubt fear is a really great way to get people into voting booths, and I worry that a chance to have some other poor schmuck pushed around is at least as strong a draw.

     So I'm stuck on tenterhooks, at least until the election results are in, and maybe after that, because recent history has shown me that I didn't know my fellow citizens nearly as well as I thought; those gleefully smiling faces in lynching postcards from the first part of the 20th Century were not so long ago as I had let myself be led to believe.  Our worst nature is barely suppressed and, once released, difficult to bottle up again.
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* They'll learn, or if they manage to dodge learning, their kids will pick it up.  For a country without an official language, the U.S. is difficult to navigate without speaking the lingo.