It’s going to be a weird day. I hope you stay away from social media and watch the world more or less…after voting. There’s no reason to tune into the news before 7:30 tonight.

This is when we will begin our live coverage on the YouTube channel. I hope you will join us. This is what cable news could be if cable news wasn’t terrible.

That said, today I want to go high concept and talk about both the future and the past.

Once again to the breach, my friends.

One way to look at the last eight years is to consider a decade of professional wrestling: the emergence of a monster heel (Trump) destroying an aging face who was never quite done with the mob (Hillary). The heel then causes terror to reign, attracting heat like no one has ever seen.

The problem is that the writers didn’t really know where to go from there. The heel champion can’t hold the belt forever, as the audience eventually tunes out. But in 2020, no new babyface characters were ready to main event. So the writer brought a beloved old performer (Biden, obviously) out of retirement to turn heel and serve as a transitional champion.

But the public wasn’t ready to see the heel removed either. The writers therefore gave a bad ending to the 2020 match, staging a comeback for the monster heel in which he could pretend he was stolen and couldn’t wait to get his belt back.

In 2024, the writers discovered a new character (Kamala) to fight the monster heel in the main event. Only, no one knows if she will have enough of the public to have the belt put on her waist.

I hope I don’t have to explain it to you, but in this analogy, the wrestling promotion is America and the writers are the voters.

Is it depressing to view this decade of Donald Trump’s confrontation with liberal democracy as a script written by a bored and decadent public seeking to create political entertainment? Probably.

But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong either.

Share

In wrestling, all intrigues eventually end. Even the biggest ones. Hulk Hogan loses the belt. The Undertaker’s streak is interrupted. The Stone Cold–Mr. The feud with McMahon is resolved.

Usually, storylines end – or “pay off,” as the writers say – during the main event, pay-per-view. The biggest storylines are resolved at the biggest PPV of all: WrestleMania.

Again with the hammer metaphor: Election Day is our WrestleMania and Trump vs. Kamala is the main event.

The only question is what kind of finish the writers are going to give us.

There are five classic finishes in wrestling.

1. The heel wins a clear victory. (Clean meaning an uncontested end to the match without interference or chicanery.)

2. The heel gets a nasty victory.

3. The face wins a clear victory.

4. The face wins a dirty victory.

5. The schmozz: a chaotic finale that produces no clear winner or loser.

Writers choose the ending based on two factors.

First: They are considering future bookings, transitioning both face and heel into their next storylines with different opponents. Second: they try to guess which ending will be most popular with the audience.

Unfortunately, these finishes are mapped extremely of course the potential results of our elections.

(1) Trump wins a clear victory. In this scenario, Trump wins the Electoral College and keeps Harris in the majority in the popular vote.

Trump becomes champion the president again. Harris takes a back seat. The new scenario is an extension of the old one in which Trump embarks on an attempt to fundamentally change America and faces opposition from . . .

Well, this is where it gets tricky. Who would be the opposition? Biden and Harris will be gone. Republicans would hold the Senate and probably the House. They control the majority on the Supreme Court. And Trump will have a mandate to do all the illiberal things he talked about during the election: sending the military after domestic protesters, rounding up immigrants and putting them in camps, etc.

It’s a story, I guess. But it’s hard to see the writers getting started.

Leave a comment

(2) Trump wins a dirty victory. This could take two forms. The most likely is that Trump wins the electoral college while Harris exceeds 50% of the popular vote.

It’s unlikely, but possible. And even if everything goes perfectly legal and rightly so, would be considered illegitimate by the majority of the public. At best, it will spark a mass movement to change the electoral college. At worst? Yeah.

The second form is that Trump loses the vote but uses a combination of legal challenges to reverse the result. For example: By winning court battles to toss ballots during the recount. Or by asking state legislatures to send alternative elector lists, which are then considered incoming by SCOTUS.

This kind of enthusiasm might appeal to writers, but they would need the cooperation of the courts and/or various Republican elected officials to achieve it.

(3) Harris wins a clear victory. In this finale, Kamala Harris wins in such a way that most of the Republican Party and Republican voters recognize her as the new champion and Trump retires. (Maybe move on to managing a stable of wrestlers or doing ringside commentary.)

I rate this finish as extremely unlikely.

Share

(4) Harris wins a nasty victory. Harris wins the Electoral College and is (eventually) sworn in as president. But Trump and the Republicans swear up and down that she stole the title, that the election was rigged, that the referee didn’t see Biden come in with the steel chair, etc.

My take: This is the most likely outcome because it satisfies everyone in the audience. The Democrats have their new champion and she has the chance to become the face of the franchise. Republicans are getting tons of heat. Trump is completely done with his fans again and is free to move on to his next storyline without his prestige diminished. Everyone wins.

(5) The schmozz: Election results become so confusing that it’s up to the Supreme Court and/or Congress to decide a winner.

However, it is the most improbable finish it already happened. But let’s not even think about it. It’s too sinister.

What will the writers decide? I guess it’s number 4. That makes the most sense. But you never know. Sometimes, in struggle, writers willingly step aside. Sometimes they just make terrible, inexplicable decisions.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about the opening of the 2003 remake of Battlestar Galactica.

The show begins with a series of interior steadicam shots of Galactic as the ship is about to be decommissioned. Various crew members go about their tasks while a public information officer shows a group of visiting dignitaries around. Meanwhile, the old captain, played by Edward James Olmos, walks the halls rehearsing his speech for the decommissioning ceremony. Only he keeps being interrupted by a series of grateful young officers who awkwardly try to tell him what a privilege it was to serve with him.

And in every case, the old man stops, looks them in the eye and replies: “It’s My honor.”

I thought of this because over the past few weeks I’ve had a series of conversations where people have told me how grateful they are for The rampart and how much it means to them.

But in reality, it is My honor.

It’s been an honor for me to write for you guys. It was an honor for me to read your comments and speak with you via email. It has been my honor to meet hundreds of you in person and be a part of this community and movement. I think we have done important work. Doing it together, with you, was the greatest honor of my career.

Thank you, my friends.

And I want to say a word to you about my colleagues. They are, without exception, some of the greatest people you will ever meet. You know the names and faces of the reception team: Sarah, Tim, Mona, Will, Jim, AB, Joe, Sonny, Egger, Cathy, Marc, Sam and Bill.

These men and women were courageous, honest and tireless. I admire them all more than I can properly express.

And behind the scenes are my colleagues who you don’t often see, but they’ve done the work that makes it all possible: Adam Keiper, Hannah Yoest, Ben Parker, Martyn Jones, Barry Rubin, Chris Herbert, Sebastian Hughes, Catherine Lowe . , Meaghan Leister, Jamie Abraham, Katie Cooper, Jason Brown, Patrick Stoltzfus, Conor Kilgore, Addison Del Mastro, Tony Franquiz, Noah Friedman, Rupert Manderstam and Jonah Yurman.

I know people’s eyes glaze over when they see lists of names. I understand. But even though it sounds silly, I want you to know their names. Because they built this thing alongside you.

I’m at an age where I now have a good number of work colleagues. I’ve been fortunate that over the years, the vast majority of them have been great people. But not all two.

Except here. Each person to The rampart is aces. These are people I would entrust my children to. People I would go to war with.

It was the honor of my life to work with them.

Whatever happens today, tomorrow we will all still be in the same boat.

Vaya with Dios, my friends. I’ll see you on the other side.

Leave a comment

No, not the movie.

A notebook is a record of both solitude and connection. It’s a place where quiet, wavering thoughts can be brought to fruition that might otherwise go unnoticed, where words and sketches can stumble and fail. In a laptop, failure has fewer consequences because it’s not a failure at all; it is a necessary part of the messiness of exploration, of letting the unknown and uncertain find form.

Look no further than the notebooks of famous authors and artists whose relationships with these essential creative tools are chronicled by Roland Allen in THE NOTEBOOK: A history of thought on paper (Biblioasis, 416 pages, paperback, $19.95). Beginning with a wax tablet recovered from a wrecked ship around 1305 BC, Allen traces how notebooks, and their many permutations, were used by a wide range of people – including politicians, mathematicians and sailors – from whole world.

The book is a revealing document of a relationship so intimate that it is sacred: that of the writer and the page. It’s a reminder that taking notes is an act of noticing, of being present and presenting yourself over and over again on a blank sheet of paper, and discovering what can happen there. Below is a brief illustrated history, inspired by “The Notebook,” of some of the luminaries who did just that.

Read the whole thing.