November 5, 2024 is purportedly federal election day in the United States of America but the concept of an “election day” has become meaningless.  And that may not be a negative although how that has come about is troubling given that the main goal of that evolutive process seems to have become, not the implementation of more effective democracy but rather, the facilitation of more efficient electoral fraud and manipulation.

How so?

Well, in its least malign aspect, the evolving trend towards a voting season rather than an electoral day looks to “lock-in” voters prior to the availability of information necessary to make adequately informed voting decisions, thus making electoral manipulation more feasible.  That, of course, is tied into the manipulation of essential information by the corporate media through not only the publication and dissemination of distortions and outright lies as facts, but by the obfuscation of important relevant information, the Hunter Biden laptop from Hell being a prime, albeit far from the most important, example.  At least as nefarious are the range of voting procedures crafted by those who seek to minimize electoral safeguards through a longer, less organized and poorly monitored voting cycle, one where, for example, the State of California has criminalized required identity verification prior to voting and indeed, where most states controlled by the Democratic Party have taken steps to permit the casting of votes by people who provide no proof of who they are nor of their right to do so. 

The mass mailing of unsolicited ballots coupled with the ability to “harvest” and return such ballots is obviously designed, in its most benign aspect, to create a “market” for the purchase and sale of votes, and for the theft and unauthorized casting of ballots in its most nefarious form.  And that is where we find ourselves as the electoral season draws to a close “on or about” this November 5.  I use the phrase “on or about” because there is no longer a “hard date” by which votes must be cast given that judges and electoral officials in Democratic Party controlled states, and even in Democratic Party controlled counties and electoral districts have taken to insisting that the absence of postmarks or the receipt of ballots with postmarks beyond the date fixed for their return should be ignored in the interests of what they claim is a more ample form of democracy, something that seems akin to the old political slogan of “vote early and vote often”.

I have long avocated for an electoral period rather than an election day in order to make participation in the electoral process more convenient.  Decades ago I proposed that elections should take place over a series of set dates, perhaps as long as three or four, with results published daily to motivate the lazy to cast their votes when it became obvious that their participation would be essential in order for candidates they preferred to emerge victorious. But I understood that as important as participation in the electoral process was, safeguarding of the electoral process was at least as important, and that real democracy required limiting participation to eligible voters through strictly enforced safeguards, safeguards in fact effectively imposed in the poorest and least technologically advanced countries, safeguards such as photo identification cards, signatures and fingerprints.  In the Republic of Colombia where I currently reside such procedures are uniformly applied and though not perfect (electoral fraud still exists), at least efforts are made to minimize electoral fraud rather than to promote it.

In the United States, democracy is not thriving, it never has.  At the best of times the country has been ruled through a patchwork two-party dictatorship at the local, state, regional and federal levels, the “duopoly” at it is referred to by its critics, among them many smaller political parties, independent candidates and concerned voters.  But today’s Democratic Party seeks to eliminate even the duopoly.  During the past four years it has utterly corrupted the penal and judicial systems in order to minimize the ability of opponents to run against its pre-selected candidates, and I do not refer specifically to Donald Trump.  He at least is powerful enough to fight back.  But rather, to the most decent among alternative options, people like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of the assassinated senator and former attorney general, Robert Francis Kennedy and the nephew of the assassinated president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy; people like the eminent and brilliant Afro-American philosopher, academic and civic leader, Cornell West; people like eminent physician and civic leader, Jill Stein; people like former Democratic Party congressman and peace activist Dennis Kucinich.  Perhaps even worse, in an effort to retain permanent dictatorial power for the ill-named Democratic Party, the Biden administration has done everything possible to curtail opposing viewpoints through criminalization of the right to hold and express opposing opinions and in that effort has recruited the major news media and the major internet platforms.

Not that the GOP, the Grand Old Party, otherwise known as the Republicans are all that much better although, except when it comes to blind allegiance to Zionists imperil ambitions, it is significantly less inclined to engage in military adventures abroad or to censorship and lawfare at home.  Still, its candidate in this election is one of the world’s least pleasant persons, an egotistical, self-promoting demagogue.  How far have we sunk as a polity when he seems far more trustworthy than the slick loophole specialists who oppose him, the Clintons and the Obamas if not quite the Bidens, those who offer us as a choice the chameleonic Kamala Harris, lawyers all, lawyers beloved of the quasi-cultural Hollywood and New York elites and, of course, of the Deep State moles who believe they’ve found the “one ring to rule us all and in the darkness bind us”.

Absolute power seems to be the goal and, as the old adage claims, “absolute power corrupts absolutely”.  Today, the descendants of those who believed they were fighting against such tyranny instead find themselves actively involved in promoting genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid on the one hand as they court nuclear holocaust on the other, all in order to enrich the tiny minority of billionaires reliant for their political and economic power on perpetual war and oppression.  And on our own cowardice, cupidity and stupidity.

It is, in all probability, too late to defeat the forces of darkness arrayed against us, but we can still, at least, back our own versions of Tolkien’s Frodo: I allude to people like Jill Stein and Cornell West who are still options, and in other elections, we can decide to vote for any candidate unaligned with the duopoly.  As always, if enough of us took that road less travelled, we might somehow find ourselves glimpsing a light at the end of that deep dark tunnel into which we’ve been forced to descend, assured that the wreak of filth and death we smell is really milk and honey.

As the purportedly Wicked Witch of the West exclaimed in the 1930’s movie version of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, … “what a world, what a world”!  But perhaps hers is not the last word.

In 1875 poet William Ernest Henley, perhaps channeling the “darker days referenced by Sigmund Freud, wrote a poem he entitled “Invictus”, one I share as I close, albeit set in prose:

Out of the night that covers me, black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud.  Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade, and yet, the menace of the years finds and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.