Bye Bye Biden

We still lived in LA the last time the elections came around — back in the time of covid lockdowns and in the grips of pandemic paranoia and still some months away from being a father, when I had no idea of the kind of joy that would bring and the new worlds that it would open up. I wrote about my impressions of that election day — when much of the city erupted in a spontaneous celebration, with car caravans and dancing in the streets…

When we went out to try to get some lunch out in Hollywood later that afternoon, the city had transformed into a giant block party. People had gathered on street corners — dancing, cracking champagne bottles, pouring wine. In one spot, an impromptu parade formed down Santa Monica Boulevard, with people hanging out of their Teslas and Land Rovers and Porsches with giant American flags, manically honking and yelling as crowds lined both sides of the street to cheer them on. There were even a bunch of people in American flag pants. Pants! I had never seen anything like it. Who knew LA liberals owned so many giant Trump-sized American flags? Guess they had them tucked away in storage all during the Not My President Era. But now that Trump was on the way out they could once again be American First without embarrassment.

Naturally, the homeless encampments — and the people sleeping on benches and in doorways — that these people passed in their spontaneous parade didn’t factor into the equation. Los Angeles is a Democratic Party city in a Democratic Party state run by all sorts of Joe Biden-type politicians, and the place is one of the premiere neoliberal hellholes in America. It’s got the highest poverty rate in the country and the biggest number of people living on the streets and oligarchs privatizing our water. And it’s done absolutely nothing for the poor and vulnerable during all these quarantines and shutdowns.