Surprise Lilies

The election energy is good, enjoy it while it lasts.

I was twenty miles outside of Normal when I heard the news.

We were at a Burger King in central Illinois. In the corner of the Burger King was a large, inflatable bear. He was decked out in a red, white, and blue ensemble with a bow tie and a top hat. He held a faded American flag in one hand and a sign saying GOD BLESS AMERICA in the other.

A crown rested on his head. It was upside down.

That is what I was looking at when I heard that Joe Biden was leaving the presidential race.

The bear grinned blankly. A pile of new crowns lay on the windowsill, displacing the gold standard. The new crowns said “FIERY” to advertise the new menu, which consists of Burger King putting hot spices in everything, even Sprite. Why not? There’s no way it will be the worst or weirdest decision of the year.

2024 is a good time to get away with things. And get away from things, too.

I ordered the same meal I’ve been getting since 1984: the Original Chicken Sandwich with no mayo. This is the greatest sandwich of all time. The struggle to match the glory of this sandwich is what The Bear should have been about. Now I’m not saying to go get yourself pregnant, but I will say that eating the Burger King Original Chicken while with child was the most spectacular culinary experience of my life.

This is probably not what you wanted to read about, but bear with me; inflatable inverted crown Burger King bear with me.

It takes time to dissect a week that feels like a decade-long fever dream.

I’m glad the sandwich that I discovered when I was five tastes the same. I’m glad to be rid of a politician who had been serving as Senator for a decade by the time I was five, because his horrid political instincts stayed the same too. I long to be rid of the other candidate, a career criminal who should have been serving time since I was five, because he got worse, and the world got worse with him.

We left Burger King and hit the highway. NORMAL, a sign declared, beckoning us to the offramp to Normal, Illinois. I was tempted to visit so I could tell people what Normal feels like. I unwrapped my sandwich and thought about the election.

One down, one to go, I thought, and took a bite.

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You may think this is not very respectful of Joe Biden. But Joe Biden has not been very respectful to the Palestinians whose slaughter he funded; or the covid victims whose plight he minimized (including, now, himself); or the Americans he betrayed when he countenanced sedition; or the Black Americans who suffered under the racist laws he passed for decades before repositioning himself behind Barack Obama and hoping everyone would forget.

I’m tired of being told to rehabilitate evil acts when politically expedient. I’d rather the bad men leave and let us enjoy what is left of our lives in the wreckage they created.

I had long reconciled myself to finding the best in a bad situation, with that situation being America. But something is changing.

There is a new energy, one that took me a minute to recognize: the Future. It had been a while since I’d seen it. The Future was in absentia and now it has returned, grinning like a ghost.

Am I really seeing it? Or is it another fake-out future, like those Halloween pop-up shops that appear in the fall and make you forget the empty room rotting the rest of the year? The classic American haunt: a tease, then abandonment.

Kamala Harris is not the future, but the energy surrounding her is. This is the raw energy of possibility, of certain doom being stripped away and discarded dreams returning.

One week before Biden dropped out, a photo of Trump emerging from an assassination attempt was deemed so “iconic” that his win was proclaimed certain. Now people have either forgotten it happened or are waiting to get their questions about the Secret Service, the shooter, and Trump’s minor injury answered.

Suddenly, Trump seems like the D-grade mobster he always was, only now everyone can see the obvious. Suddenly, Kamala Harris’s offbeat behavior feels like a balm. If you’ve got two weirdos, and one is a raving sociopath, and the other is a kooky lady who laughs a lot, the kooky lady comes off as endearing instead of “not fit for leadership”, which was the old narrative of Harris. Trump is hateful; Harris is human.

Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic nominee. I’m reserving judgment on what that means until she has policy plans, a list of administrative hires — and, most importantly, a commitment to make right what the Biden administration did wrong.

There is no shame in humility. There is nothing wrong with distancing yourself from one of the most unpopular presidents in US history, particularly when he earned the title through mass death and mass murder.

There is no shame in apologies, but actions speak louder than words, and action is desperately needed. Harris has an opportunity to end some of Biden’s most destructive policies, including his support of Israel’s genocide of children.

If you think this is unlikely, particularly from a presidential nominee who took as much AIPAC money as Harris, you are probably right, but look at last week:

An assassin targeted Trump. Biden got covid again. The biggest cyber breakdown in history took down the world, and the world came back. The GOP convention happened, and no one cared, even with the fascist chants and the fake ear bandages, because there was too much else going on. Biden dropped out. Harris dropped in.

I don’t know what is going to happen next, and for once it feels good.

As I write this, Harris has been the presumptive nominee for 48 hours. The energy from voters in those 48 hours is more than the rest of the year combined. People are excited. They are making plans. Not wistful daydreams — plans!

One of their plans should be how to combat Project 2025, because the GOP is not going to abandon their autocratic agenda if Harris wins. Another should be how to fend off The Coup: Part Two, because the Biden administration did not punish the key perpetrators of the January 6 plot, thus making a second coup attempt both possible and likely. And because Merrick Garland let Trump run out the clock, Trump was given official immunity from prosecution by the Supreme Court.

We are in for hard times. But there is a sense of a burden being lifted, of options emerging. I don’t know how long this feeling will last.

Many Americans have spent the past eight years joining political cults: a common phenomenon in flawed democracies turning into autocracies. Americans must reject cult logic if we want our nation to survive.

This includes not building a political cult around Kamala Harris. A campaign is different than a cult. It is one thing to back a candidate and cheer them on. It is another to submit to a mindset of fear, deference, and servitude; to browbeat fellow voters offering constructive criticism; and to proclaim a politician’s every puzzling move either an Act of God or evidence of a Secret Noble Plan.

Americans created cults around Trump, Mueller, Garland, Pelosi, Garland, Fauci, “Q”, and Biden, among others, to the detriment of our nation’s health and to the benefit of grifters’ wallets.

Savior syndrome is a sign of national decline. The saviors are frequently betrayers of the public — thus the need for a cult of sycophants to cover their crimes — but sometimes they are simply outlets for desperation.

Kamala Harris is not going to save America. No lone individual can with this level of corruption.

But Harris can be pressured to gut out institutional rot and pass humane policies — and yes, I realize these sound like fantasies, but don’t you know what year it is?! Don’t you know what country you’re living in? Everything about America 2024 is fantasy, usually of the nightmare variety. Why not add some good to the mix?

These ideas are not true fantasies, by the way. Americans label them fantasies because it hurts too much to hope. These “fantasies” are, in reality, demands that Americans have made for decades. They are calls for accountability, long unheeded. Americans deserve a president who will listen and care and act. We do not need another bot-brained cult to defend them if they fail.

The only American royalty that counts is the Burger King Original Chicken Sandwich. Everything else is just a whopper.

*          *          *

When I got home from Illinois, there were flowers in my backyard. They sprouted while I was gone. Pale-purple and pink petals tilted toward the sun, their elegant stems incongruous in the plain green grass.

The flowers are called “surprise lilies” because they seem to come out of nowhere. They tend to bloom in July or August, but you never know if they will arrive, or when. You only know it will happen fast.

One day, you’ve got nothing, and the next day, your yard is full of flowers.

They won’t last forever, so breathe deep, and enjoy the moment while you can.

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Now this is what The Bear should have been about!