Factions

By Sniffles

With the cable news pundits opining on the 2022 midterms, it occurs to us cats that they have not totally gotten their heads around the reverberations of January 6. How do they know that traditionally Republican voters will continue to stick with their party in the wake of an obvious insurrection?

We think they don't know.

Similarly, how do the pundits know the effects that COVID-19 will wreak upon future elections? Yes, America was able to conduct a free, fair, high-turnout election in the middle of a worldwide pandemic. But what effects will it have on people's opinions going forward? To predict that, perhaps it would help to appreciate the experiences of the past — specifically, the effects of the last great pandemic in 1918:

"It killed from Alaska to Zanzibar. Groucho Marx caught the flu in New York, and Mahatma Gandhi in Ahmedabad. The future Mustafa Kemal Atatürk went down with it in Vienna. Haile Selassie fell ill in Addis Ababa. T.S. Eliot got the flu in London — he wrote The Waste Land as he recovered. Other victims who recovered included Franklin Roosevelt, Lillian Gish, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Béla Bartók, Walt Disney, Ezra Pound and the aviator Amelia Earhart. In Colorado, Katherine Anne Porter’s black hair fell out as a result of flu. When it grew back her hair was white and Porter went on to write a memoir, Pale Horse, Pale Rider."

The bottom line is that the headlines of today don't reflect the story lines of historians' tomorrow. We cats suspect that after the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, American voters might be more in the mood to punish Republican/Trumpian candidates than the pundit class realizes. After all, as President Biden said, the Trump wing of the Republican Party is the bulk of the GOP — but it's a minority of the American people. We cats agree, and we HISS.