IN THE FACTORY – by Jim Kent

In the family of an old friend, when the mom saw someone sitting on the arm of a chair or sofa, she would launch into a routine that everyone knew some version of by heart: “In the factory where they make the chairs, they put the arms on the sides and the seat cushions in the middle for a reason.”  If the mood struck her, she would then expatiate on the topic.

This comes handy more often than you might think: “In the factory where they make the cars, they install turn signals for a reason,” to cite one common example.

I think of this often when I see a bad guy on a television show point a pistol at someone, first rotating their wrist ninety degrees counterclockwise. “In the factory where they make the guns,” I think or sometimes say aloud, “they put the sights where they do for a reason”--to wit, if you use the sights to aim, you’re more likely to hit your target. Holding your weapon sidewise practically guarantees that your target will die peacefully in bed at some later date.

The good guys don’t do this. Adhering to their training and practice, they go into a stable crouch, hold the weapon in both hands, and aim down the sights. Real-life bad guys, among whom I have some acquaintances, rotate their wrists even when unarmed and pretending to shoot.  This has baffled me for many years.

Misusing the tools of the trade isn’t limited to pistol-packing gangsters, of course. You can thwart your own intentions in many lines of endeavour by ignoring obvious cues—like where the sights are located—so that you can’t achieve your objective.

Through reasoning that I think is only moderately tortured, it has occurred to me that this is a plausible metaphor for what the Democrats are doing wrong lately. Remember the 1930 off-year elections and the 1932 Presidential year, when Republicans were turned out of office in great numbers, and the 1948 Truman surprise when he ran against the “do-nothing Congress”?  What those show is that voters do pay attention sometimes, especially if the policy shortcomings of the incumbents can be deftly laid at their doorstep.

One supposes that the most important immediate objective of the Democratic party is to make sure that no candidate from my jellyfish tank is elected to anything around here for a good long time.  After all, M. Petits-Doigts can do very little without the connivance of Republican majorities in both chambers of the Congress.  Thus, the Ds should aim squarely at making the Republican brand toxic, making full use of using all the tools at their disposal.

Instead, they are steadfastly rotating their gun hands and making the sights useless.  We have just been treated to a nation of well-meaning persons who are out in the streets but whose aim is awry. The No Kings crowd were out there inveighing against a senile old fat man who will never again be a candidate for public office. For every hundred or so signs of which he (or some fantasized king) was the subject, I saw maybe one pointing out the need to defeat my Republicans. What tools are available that might help if properly aimed?

Well, demonstrations are actually one such, but they need to be about the enablers and not the addict. Demonstrations are organized for a reason.

Polls that showed folks leaning Democrat for 2022 will help a lot more than polls showing the declining popularity of a guy who will never run again. The national pollsters write their own questions, and it will take a long time for the press to get over the fixation on him and start to ask questions relevant to the actual situation—not “How is the old man doing?” but “Will you be voting R or D next year?”

However, it is perfectly okay for the Ds to commission polls that address such questions. These must be honest polls, as valid and reliable as they can be made to be, with no loaded questions and no weird statistical manipulation. Somebody needs to deal from the top of the deck, after all. Polls are conducted for a reason.

Slogans and bumper stickers and whatnot need to be adjusted to be about parties (“Democrats help people. Republicans judge people.”) and not about abstractions that amurricans pretend to care about but don’t because nobody really understands them, like democracy and equality and rule of law.  Slogans and bumper stickers are developed for a reason.

In media appearances and interviews, Democrat leaders need to stop talking about the President or the Vice-President or the Clown-Car Cabinet and talk instead about the Republicans who are taking away health care and jobs and services, replacing those with taxes on imports and increasing inflation.  Nobody should ever refer to any of that crowd without using the Republican tag—the Republican President making the US a laughingstock, the Republican Congress taking away your health insurance. Media appearances occur for a reason.  It’s the Republicans, stupid.

In the interest of what may remain of national unity, some effort should probably be made to separate the real Republicans, of whom there are many although mostly not in the Congress just now, from the MAGAtes. Vote for any Republican who has remained (or has become) decent and patriotic enough to reject Bozo and all his works and all his empty promises, and to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It’s the degüello for every other candidate from my party.

The underlying ideas are:

• to make Republican functionaries and officeholders and candidates more afraid of the voters than they are of The Great Pumpkin; and

• to remind voters that the problems caused by Republican mismanagement will not go away when The Great And Powerful Oz leaves office.

Every time I bring stuff like this up, there is a lot of Democrat whining about how things are different now and what about voter suppression and how can we get the real truth out and what about gerrymandering and it all seems hopeless and pointless.  But despair is not a strategy, and neither is hope. Have a plan, pick your targets, adjust your sights, and for God’s sake hold your weapon properly. In the factory. . . .

ADDENDUM: In case this discussion gets any public attention, I expect to hear from the Keystone Kops that now infest the federal law enforcement machinery, accusing me of encouraging assassinations and other violence.  Ordinarily I wouldn’t flatter myself about this, but these days there seems to be no slight so trivial as to escape the net.  My suggestion to them will be, shall we say, anatomically impossible.