#3 - Notes on Election Days Past

A brief history of my life in election days.

Long time listeners of my program “The Trillbillies” will know that collectively we’ve long been derisive concerning electoral politics. Hell, a common refrain from 2017 til yesterday was mostly that it’s a bourgeois conceit save for the Bernie months.

Truth is I love election day in the same way and for the same reason I love Valentine’s Day: it provides a fun facsimile of what the real thing could be in a perfect world. And much like love and marriage--voting and electoralism is like “the house” in Las Vegas, rigged slightly against you and hard to beat in the long run but fun to play against nevertheless. My good fortune that I was born the descendent of Scottish-Irish migrants that would become America’s hillbillies and give their gift to the world--no not moonshine or the hammer dulcimer although those are certainly gifts of a kind--but rather electioneering. For the American Hillbilly, politics is akin to a kind of spectator sport and when we were powering industrial revolutions with our labor in the coal mines we were an integral bloc to court. This is less true these days as coal miners are about like thatchers, poets, and chimney sweeps but old habits die hard and this is still an important day for us.

Here’s what I remember about mine:

1992: As a child going into the voting booth with my mother I insist on punching in her picks: Bill Clinton for President, Wendell Ford for Senate, Mark Larkey, Gary Mullins for Whitesburg City Council, a smack on my wrist. “What?” “Gary Mullins is a rotten son of a bitch.” I’ve only heard my mother cuss three times ever.

1996: Saw Bill Clinton talk in Hazard, Kentucky that summer. Linda Ellerbee explains on the tv at school how even we could get involved in politics as kids. This is tantamount to child abuse, but didn’t stop me from dressing up as H. Ross Perot and racing two of my classmates clad in polyester sack suits with stick horses between our legs before the whole school as part of our election day programming at Whitesburg Middle.

2000: Outkast’s “Stankonia” is days old and I remember playing “Gangsta Sh*t” (Feat. Slimm Calhoun, C-Bone, and T-Mo Goodie) en route to a Gore/Lieberman event when things like that still happened. Things, ummm, devolved from there.

2004: First presidential election I was eligible to vote in. Extremely 2020 vibes: Vote or Die! Save the Republic! Battle for the Soul of the nation! Went to a fraternity mixer earlier in the day; this is the era of the full windsor knot, NFL football fans will call this the “Merrill Hoge” and I wore one with purple and black stripes with a polyester candy cane striped Lion work shirt, an Atlanta braves hat broke way off, a Rocawear belt buckle covered in fake diamonds, baggy Girbaud jeans and air force 1s. Stood in the bathroom with some friends changing my attitude with some Heaven Hill green label poured in a Coke bottle before we went out to mix with the ladies of Gamma Phi Beta. Largely forgettable but two of the girls asked me if I had voted yet and I hadn’t so looking like a poor man’s 2003 TI and smelling like the sticky bathroom floor of a honky tonk I stumbled across the finish line with minutes to spare and punched one in for Ralph Nader.

2008: Suffered my first panic attack although I thought it was something more sinister when my girlfriend called me on her way back from Ohio where she went to punch one in for Obama where it mattered more and I couldn’t put a sentence together to explain what was happening to me: beet red face, racing heart, sweating profusely, narrowed vision. I’d smoked high grade salvia with some friends days before and found myself bound to the floor of hell by several pairs of scaly red arms for what felt like eternity but was really 7 minutes. Probably not related. Friend Barry was accosted by bats, friend Nick laid bricks for the Crayola Bunny’s house, the mortar was buttercream. Cried when Obama won, secretly worried latent diabetes was to blame for my episodes.

2012: Worked for the Clintons for a while in Arkansas. Met Bill Clinton and explained I was from Whitesburg, Kentucky. He immediately knew it was “close to Hazard” and explained that he and Mayor Gorman had been friends for years. After hearing Clinton tell this folksy story about being the only person to ever lose a race for Hot Springs City Council (not sure if this was the office, but for story’s sake) that went on to be President, I decided to move home and run for Whitesburg, Kentucky city council. Listened to election night returns with friends where I tied with local attorney Matt Butler--262 votes apiece. Won the election the following Monday on the flip of a Sacagawea dollar.

2016: Went to bed early because the CNN coverage early on looked like Hilary in a walk. Awoken in the middle of the night by my brother Ty who told me to turn the tv on. Woke up the next morning and nothing was the same. Started a podcast a few months later what they surely mean when they say “a fate worse than death.”

2020: Month nine of once in a lifetime (fingers crossed) global health crisis preceded by traumatic breakup with the love of my life, bookended with the possibility of four more years under the thumb of a brain addled game show host billionaire who once promoted a doll that said 12 of his oft said phrases and who himself has since become the doll. Other possibility is being under the thumb of a guy who the inimitable Felix Beiderman most accurately described as the one guy with power who also has the lowest imagination for corruption and would stab you in the back for a kind word from an executive and an ING Direct Windbreaker (I’m paraphrasing). Windbreaker man also mistook his sister for his wife earlier in the campaign.

Everything’s fine.