When Putsch Comes to Shove

Scrawled on the mailbox outside the apartment I’m subletting in Manhattan is the message ‘Fuck Trump’. You expect that sort of thing, I suppose, in this often vulgar and always blue city, where any 12 names from the phone book will convict a Republican in a New York minute. About 500-odd miles to the west, in the yard of a heavy machinery dealer beside an Interstate near the West Virginia border, there is a monster flag on a very tall pole with the white-on-navy message ‘Fuck Biden’. One imagines it has now been brought down, just as Biden himself has been brought down, and that in some distant Chinese sweatshop the first rush orders are arriving for ‘Fuck Kamala’ banners.

In America’s legacy newsrooms, there has been no need for such prompts or instructions to begin stoking, as Joni Mitchell put it, “the star-maker machinery of the popular song”. And boy, was the media choir quick to get on-song with their hymns to Her. Behold Kamala, not the cackling klutz you might think you…