Me and My Vote - finis

In late summer, 1976, we were back in Iowa, when I read a note about the Sioux County Republicans holding a meeting at the TePaske theater of the high school. I decided to attend. I don't remember the issues exactly, although I probably could guess because they haven't changed: Democrats were socialists, Marxists, communists--however many of those adjectives you could stack up in front of the name. Democrats hated America. Democrats weren't Americans; they weren't patriots, and if we didn't call them out, the whole country was down the tubes. You know, same-old same-old.

I walked out of TePaske Theater than night and never looked back. The world around me in northwest Iowa hadn't changed much at all, and while I wasn't yet convinced I was a real live Democrat, I knew this much for sure--that clown show made it perfectly clear that I was no Republican. 

I voted for the peanut farmer in 1980, not Ronald Reagan. At the time, I was, once more, a graduate student, now at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. We'd moved, again, and now there was a little toe-headed little guy on the crew, David, born a couple years earlier in 1978. 

The day after the Presidential election that year, the entire English department, it seemed, should have shut down in grief and sorrow. The phony Western actor was going to be in the oval office. I never liked Ronald Reagan, but I didn't hate him, like so many did. I remember standing at an English department water fountain--in Wisconsin people call them "bubblers"--and actually chuckling at the doomsday horrors hovering over everything.

In 1984, back in Iowa, I was among the few and the proud who voted defiantly for Minnesota's Walter Mondale, even though the election turned into another rout, up there with Goldwater and McGovern. I didn't hate Reagan, but neither did I trust him.

In 1988, I voted for George H. W. Bush, in part, I think, because that picture of George Dukakis, of Massachusetts, in that tank, wearing that helmet was just too silly a cartoon. Dukakis got creamed by racism, by ads about Willy Horton and the spectre of Black criminality, a long-time favorite issue for Democrats, an issue they haul out every four years in an attempt to scare the excrement out of white voters. 

In 92, I wasn't all that fond of the Governor of Arkansas or his wife, but I voted Clinton rather than abide another round of George H.W. I never cozied up to the Clintons, basically because I saw him as a womanizer, which he was. I couldn't help believing that if could lie so smooth and often about his excesses, he could lie about other things, the kind of man, a Canadian friend of mine used to say, who could shake hands with his right hand while pissing on your leg with his left. I just didn't believe him, but I voted his way because ever since that Sioux County Republican meeting in the TePaske I knew this much at least--I wasn't a Republican.

In '96, I honestly don't know who got my vote, although I remember--and somewhere around here, I'm sure--is a button featuring the face of that odd little man from Texas, Ross Perot, who told America in no uncertain terms that if they'd vote him into office, he'd by golly lift the hood of the nation and get down there and fix it. I didn't vote for him, because it would have been--and was--a wasted vote. But there was something about him I liked. I liked Dole more than I liked the Clintons, but I wasn't a Republican.

In 2000, I voted for W. I remember why, and I distinctly remember regretting it.

In 2008, I wouldn't have voted for him for any money. I admired him after 9/11, but the war in Iraq felt for all the world like another Vietnam. John Kerry knew what was was like, despite the lies of the Republicans who tried to swift-boat him. Kerry got my vote, the whole Iraq thing a quagmire that never should have been. Saddam had no nukes--George W. Bush was either lying or incompetent.

In 2008, I wore a t-shirt that said Obama 2008. Twice in a matter of weeks, I was upbraided angrily--really angrily--by people I'd never seen so insanely angry before. They were outraged, both of them. Obama was a baby killer, didn't I know that? How can you side with a baby killer? Even my own grandson, a kindergartner, knew as much. One morning he crawled up into my lap and, out of nowhere, told me that Obama killed babies. 

All of that made me more sure I wasn't a Republican. Besides, I'd heard Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. It had been something of a
phenomenon, and I couldn't help thinking that what we all needed, Euro- and African-American, was a man of color in the White House.

In the years since I've not come near to voting Republican again, and I don't really understand at all people who do, even though I'm in a tiny minority all around. Trump has been an abomination, a criminal abomination. 

In 2022, the election just completed, I voted for Mike Franken and not Charles Grassley, in part because Grassley is too old and has spent too much of his campaign as a chum of the orange crook. Eighty per cent of the county went for Grassley. Voting Democratic is always, here, a losing cause; people believe, I can't help thinking, that their grandfathers will roll over in their graves should their grandsons and daughters vote Democratic. 

All of this started with a simple question: how did you vote this year? 

I thought simply to answer that question, but I wanted you to understand.

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I think that's it!!!