TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY

"In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won't happen.  As the day approached, my warm bed and comfortable house grew increasingly desirable and my dear wife incalculably precious.  To give these up for three months for the terrors of the uncomfortable and unknown seemed crazy.  I didn't want to go.  Something had to happen to forbid my going, but it didn't"--Travels With Charley

 Yesterday I had lunch with John Snow at the Schnitzelhub again.  He gave me a couple of books, and I wish I'd brought something for him!  We talked about the schedule for our book clubs (he has a new one), so we wouldn't conflict.  I was going to do The Dubliners in mid-March and Gulliver's Travels at the end of April, but moved them to late March and the end of May, after I get back from London.

I was going to show the DVD of Tom Jones at the next history event this Tuesday, but it turned out it wasn't on DVD!  So I changed it to John Ford's Stagecoach, to match our discussing the frontier earlier this month.  

Next month the history group's subject is the 1950s.  I've scheduled Lana Turner's Peyton Place for next month:  couldn't find it in the video stores, but I ordered a used copy online for ten dollars and some.  I'm now reading Steinbeck's Travels With Charley for the history group (for the second time), which actually takes place in 1960, but close enough.  The library was short of copies so this afternoon I bought a copy at Chapters in the Yonge-Eglinton Centre.  Some long queues there!

It bugs me that Clinton worshipers want to blame Trump's election on everything except the most obvious cause:  the Democrats chose a very problematic candidate.  Some of them are even blaming Bernie Sanders for promoting what they consider "false narratives" about Hillary Clinton!  And some are still insisting that Sanders was never a genuine Democrat.  I want to say to them, "Well, he's more of a Democrat than Trump, isn't he?  Who's being a 'purist' now?" And which candidate was the true Democrat when Congress was voting on invading Iraq?  If any candidate was cynically "using" the party to advance his personal ambition, it seems to me, that would be Clinton.  

But too many Democrats had a specious notion of loyalty to their "team," and chose the wrong moment to be clannish.  I say this as someone who had seen Hillary's weaknesses, yet actually ended up swallowing the line that she'd win anyway!  It wasn't so much that I was won over to admiring her political skills, more that I just gave up on doubting.  I've been accused of "gloating," but I'm really rather annoyed:  when the Democrats screwed Bernie Sanders--the Republicans have no monopoly on vote suppression!--they screwed themselves, and the nation.  

Some people are denying that Sanders could have beaten Trump, but their arguments don't impress me.  Almost everyone who voted for Hillary would have voted for Bernie too; while almost everyone who would have voted Republican to defeat Bernie voted to defeat Hillary anyway.  Bernie would surely have managed a higher turnout among Democratic voters, especially in the all-important category of young voters.  And he clearly would have got greater support from the independent voters, a crucial group. (He probably would have won the nomination if independents hadn't been excluded from crucial state primaries.) I also think he would have grabbed more Republican votes than did Hillary, whom the Republicans had a longstanding hate-on for.  At the very least, it's very hard to imagine him doing any worse than she did--would he have taken Wisconsin for granted?  Sure, the Republicans would have thrown the works at him, but I think he would have won anyway.  Trump only had to outperform the polls by a couple of percentage points to upset Clinton, but to upset Sanders he would have had to outperform them by almost ten points!

Some people have been calling on the Electoral College to rebel and install Hillary as president, but I think they should install Bernie!  Democrats, who mostly supported Hillary, are about 30% of the U.S. population; Republicans, who mostly supported the Donald, are also about 30%; but independents, who mostly supported Bernie, are more like 40%.  The two-party system is a barrier to American democracy.

A Greek philosopher said: "The fox has a thousand ideas in his head.  The hedgehog has one big idea." It occurred to me that Trump is a hedgehog.  Hedgehogs are sometimes underestimated, though in this case it was more that Hillary Clinton was overestimated.