YES, VIRGINIA, THERE ARE CRAZY CAT GENTS.

Predictably, one of them contributes to Common Dreams.

In about two months the season of national absurdity will conclude with the last episode of "End of Times Election Blues." It is rumored that a 15 second commercial spot on the show will cost more than the GDP of the poorest twenty five nations on earth. Don't trouble yourself to fact-check this—hyperbole often leads to higher truths.

The election itself will be anticlimactic—fascism has preceded its formal institution by (you choose the answer) months, years or decades. Nonetheless, people will be sweating, shaking and dying in front of their election night TVs and ambulances will be hauling away the dead. The voters have been stripped of their agency—reduced to passive spectators whose public lives effectively end at the moment they cast their ballots. Imagine fireflies or spawning salmon who die almost immediately following the conclusion of the mating/egg laying cycle. Once you check your ballot you've blown your wad—you no longer exist. In a voter's afterlife agency gives way to naked anxiety.

One might argue that people don't have to spawn and die like a row of delicatessen fish—they could rise up and throw off their proverbial chains. But that suggestion trivializes the entire narrative. We collectively leap into the abyss of fascism because our powers of comprehension have been viciously eroded—not a being among us has failed to watch a million hours of brain strangling advertisements.

Sometimes it is hard to distinguish the Heavy Irony from the Deepest Earnestness.  The column is all about the Deepest Earnestness.

We—the disassembled, the lobotomized, the blinded—have a mandate to collective rage that no other generations ever owned. We are some of the last living beings on a long and noble planet that has been blooming and renewing for a half a billion years. The question is this: how badly can we be wounded and still have the capacity to rebel? And what does rebellion mean? I believe that the cornerstone of resistance proceeds from a single question—how fucked are we if no force intercedes to prevent the current political momentum of the U.S. from continuing. Newton said it best—a body in motion remains in motion until acted upon by another force. The election cycle, I believe, should be seen as a mass blessing for Newtonian principles—we vote to ratify our place in the corporate orbit, our approval of capitalist momentum.

It's amusing, though, to read an essay that might not even encouraging the communist wing of the Democrats to vote for the Jarrett regency and then continue arguing with it.

We have a critical election in which we will choose whether to elect a fully fascist administration to drive us into the downtown district of hell on the expressway, or we can elect a regime to buoy us up with slogans while chauffeuring us pleasantly to the exact same hell.

The choice is not who to vote for, but what do you (we) do after the votes are counted and we reelect capitalism with the 99 percent approval rating that a North Korean strongman expects. If Trump is elected we risk being shot protesting or shipped to one of the concentration camps he has vowed to build. If Harris is elected we are likely to be seduced by the mass psychotic delusion that will have us believing that the environment is in good hands while your tax dollars go steadfastly to building the "most lethal" fighting force in human history.

The plot for the final act in the history of the biosphere seems pretty obvious—either people engage in unprecedented acts of civil disobedience, or we all die. We now have an important electoral choice—we either elect a regime that will intimidate those committed to civil disobedience with threats and violence, or we elect a regime that will disarm public ire with bullshit and reassurances. The choice is a non-choice. The real choice comes after the election.

Without even the opportunity to pet your emotional support cat.  Oh, wait, there is no such animal.