Sitting at a restaurant table in Washington, DC, Jimmy McNulty of "The Wire" a Baltimore policeman, chats over wine with Teresa Dagastino, a woman who grew up in Baltimore, but now makes a rich living in Washington, as a political consultant.
The two have been enjoying each other carnally for a few weeks but hardly know each other, and Jimmy eventually insists that they actually have a conversation, go out to a restaurant, get to know each other a little. "I feel like I'm just a breathing machine for my penis," he says. So Teresa agrees to go out to dinner.
She asks who he voted for in the last election, but McNulty is only vaguely aware who was even running for President, to Teresa's stupefaction. Politics is what she lives and breathes, after sex, she turns on TV news and comments about the on screen politicians.
She cannot believe McNulty is so indifferent to who is in the White House, much less who is in Congress.
He says none of them look much different to him, and in fact, whoever is in the White House at the moment would not know where Baltimore is, unless Air Force One had to crash land on Eutaw street. From the perspective of a Baltimore City cop, living on the streets, the nuances of the State of the Union speech mean exactly nothing.
It's not exactly the point of view of any of the characters on West Wing, who agonize over every wrong word choice, who talk about "destroying" their opposition, by which they mean outwitting them or verbally besting them.
The Phantom asked his assistant at work if she had voted. She is the mother of a ten year old, and she is Hispanic, married to a tatoo artist. She had absently said she would vote days earlier, but never made it, and finally she explained she didn't follow politics enough to really know who to vote for. This, is after many months of office chatter which revealed how foolish she thought Trump is. But for her, voting did not rank as more important than picking up take out after work, and going home to relieve her husband from day care duty.
Neither she nor her husband voted.
Martin Luther King noted "we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote."
Well, now the Negro in Mississippi can vote, and the Hispanic in Massachusetts can vote, but sees no reason to vote. Washington is an abstraction, not a reality for these young parents. Their right to vote has been hard won, back in the 60's and 70's before they were born, and freedom riders died for it, but it means nothing much to them now. Voting is something other people do.
On the Trump side, the Phantom imagines, there were likely lots of people like his assistant, for whom voting meant nothing in their lives--until Trump started giving rallies where he sounded just like them, and like the people on Fox News and talk radio. He stirred the smoldering resentful underclasses into life and brought them out to the polls as a sort of after rally party.
These folks have never watched West Wing. They watch zombie movies, and car chase and explosion movies. They could not say what the three branches of government are, or why the Supreme Court might be important, beyond maybe something to do with abortion. They have read on the internet that metformin causes cancer, and do not know that what that story was about was a batch of contaminated drug made in a single factory which had a carcinogen in it and was recalled. So metformin, the drug, causes cancer. For them, Breibart News, Fox News, CNN and PBS are all the same: They are just news, none more reliable than another. Well, except they have never watched PBS or listened to NPR.
The Phantom's assistant tried listening to NPR once, at his suggestion, but she said it was boring, all about people who lived in Africa or Europe or South America and she would never go any of those places. Her husband had never been on an airplane and only once had traveled out of New England.
On the other side, are the clinically depressed college grads who consider Trump an intimate member of their world, who regard him as that horrible frat boy they cannot avoid in the hallway or the cafeteria, who is not in their classes, but who lurks around at the parties every Friday night and gets drunk and smirks and drags off a girl to a bedroom whenever he can. He's an intruder they cannot avoid.
But, of course, they can avoid him. They can avoid him but they can simply not stop obsessing about him. He is not the thug they have to confront; he is simply the thug they cannot ignore.
He brings the rabble out onto the street, but not the streets the West Wing crowd typically frequent. He makes White Power marches by Proud Boys socially acceptable, among those who are so inclined. But there is plenty of denigration of those KKK wannabes.
We'll know, eventually, maybe by the end of this weekend, who the various secretaries of state declare the winner of the election. And then, if it's not Trump, there will be the law suits. If Trump wins, the Democrats will meekly accept it and make brave, inspiring speeches and there will be women's marches with pink knit hats and chatter on Twitter and Facebook and people complaining how vulnerable they feel, and how they feel like crying.
And then they will have to face the coming storm of the return of COVID19.
This America, man.
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