I haven’t watched or read any news (or should I say consumed any content) about the national election since Tuesday night. Not sure when I’ll get back to it, if ever. I’ve often felt relief and gratitude that I chose Vermont politics as my bailiwick, and that feeling is stronger than ever right now. I will get back to my regular beat, but right now I need to get some things off my chest, if only to prevent emotional pneumonia.

Oh, America.

Scene: Doctor’s office. “I’m afraid it’s cancer,” says the doctor. “We caught it early enough to treat, but it’ll be long and difficult.”

And the patient says, “Actually, doc, I’ll go with the cancer.” And he gets up and leaves.

We just voted for cancer.

I’m more sad than angry, which is a scary place to be. But I’ve been watching this happen over and over again since 1968, except it devolves further into absurdity every time. Richard Nixon took the presidency on transparently phony promises of peace (having fixed the election by conniving with the South Vietnamese government). Twelve years later, a political figure who seemed like a caricature in 1968 — Ronald Reagan — sauntered into the White House (having fixed the election by conniving with Iran). His tenure featured sunny proclamations aplenty, and also rampant imperialism, barely concealed racism, refusal to confront the AIDS epidemic, and a rejiggering of our economy and taxation system to favor the super-rich.

Twelve years after Reagan left, we opted for the phony cowboy from New England, George W. Bush. All he did was validate torture as official policy, entrench the surveillance state, start two unnecessary wars, explode the deficit, and leave a devastating recession in his wake.

Eight years after that, we chose Donald Trump, with all his obvious faults, because what, Hillary Clinton was too bitchy? (Also because of Trump’s conniving with Russia. The Hatch Act, a law more honored in the breach than in the observance) Trump’s presidency was a Stephen King clown show whose horrors I need not recount. He disgraced himself after the 2020 election, and he’s been exposed as a criminal, fraudster, serial rapist, failed entrepreneur, and national security threat. Not to mention his obvious mental and physical decay during the 2024 campaign.

And America just said, “Yeah, give me more of that.” (Not to mention Trump’s conniving with Russia and Israel, at least.)

So many bad things are going to happen. Having achieved complete validation, Trump will let his worst impulses rule. He’ll spend the next four years — or what fraction of it he survives — doing his best to destroy the constraints of liberal democracy and its institutions, and tilting the economy even more in favor of the oligarchs. He’ll fill the executive branch, the judiciary and Supreme Court with unqualified ideologues. You think he’s not serious about Project 2025 and letting RFK, Jr. remake our public health and food safety systems to his brainworm-addled taste?

If there is going to be a recovery from the cancer we just elected, I’m not going to live long enough to see it. It’s kind of a relief to be too old to experience the full consequences of what’s just begun. Just as an example, I won’t have to live through the nightmare of unrestrained global warming.

So yeah, back to the #vtpoli beat, where a terrible election only means a wobble back to the center. We will have a fresh crop of extremists in the Legislature, more numerous and more extreme than before, but they won’t be in a position to enact anything truly toxic. Thank goodness for small mercies.

I was a teenager living in the Detroit suburbs in the late Sixties, and I remember talking seriously with my mother about moving to Canada to avoid the draft. It never got beyond the talking stage because while Nixon didn’t end the war, he did end the draft. It was still in place when I turned 18, but it was a shadow of itself and I drew a high number, so I never faced the choice of going to Vietnam or leaving the country.

For personal reasons I won’t get into here, we are again contemplating a departure. We’ll probably stay, but that has as much to do with logistics as with any sense of belonging to this enterprise we call America, that shining city on the hill that was built on the bones of the land’s original inhabitants and with the blood, sweat and tears of an enslaved race.

Yeah, I guess in the context of our origin story, voting for cancer makes a little more sense.