On the eve of the election

1.

The last days before the elections are drawn and fly at the same time. We cannot wait for the end and we are afraid that he will not be the same as we want. The nervous energy of voters gathers in ball lightning, and everything is sparkling near it. Even the calendar was reduced to two: before and after. Actually, this hassle is called democracy. Unpredictability is its substantial sign.

Elections with a deliberate outcome are not politics, but a ritual. Elections without a choice - Oxymoron, like a sighted blind, married dad, dance of legless (gesture instead of movement).

I remember how it was. Indeed, in my (more precisely - Brezhnev) time there was democracy. Only the Soviet, naive, like a plane of branches, which was carefully built by the natives of New Guinea to call white aliens with rifles, knives and kitchen utensils.

Cargo-culture: If everything looks like a free world, then the world will seem free and where it is imitated.

When it turns out that these shamanic procedures are not magical, but crazy, the reformation begins, as in Belarus. About which newspapers are not without enthusiasm today. Without going in, and not particularly interested in details, America sees its ideal in someone else's struggle: an inevitable change in power. Every schoolboy knows that America was born not when Washington became its first president, but when he stopped being, transferring the baton to the chosen people (and not to them) the successor. And so - the third century, without exception, and discounts on special circumstances.

The change of power, as a change in the course, allows you to go forward with tacks and never directly. The very transience of the presidential period is weights that prevent you from racing in another or dangerous side. Regular, as in astronomy, elections are a rite with practical consequences. That is why foreign trolls are engaged in discrediting not so much a specific applicant as the institution of elections itself, trying to make the indistinguishable ordinary democracy from the controlled one.

This is not to say that they succeeded. Despite the rumors of the falsifications supported by the president, despite the second wave of the pandemic holding many locked up, despite the economic troubles that distract from politics, the current elections promise to become the most massive in the history of the United States. Without waiting for the treasured Tuesday, November 3, more than 80 million have already voted. And looking at every person hearing, I think about to whom he cast his vote.

2.

Oddly enough, it is quite simple to identify the trampists on the street: they do not wear masks. Of course, not all and not always. Without a mask, for example, they are not allowed into the store. And in New York, where weapons are not as common as in the rest of America, they will not threaten a cashier with a gun who refuses to serve the buyer with a naked face.

I understand that my rule is not universal, but I still insist on my own: Trumpists are more often offended by doctors, less often believe in the virus, do not consider it fatal and deep down, as well as on the Internet, suspect the democrats of squeezing the president from the White House in Covid.

Within the framework of this worldview complex, the mask serves as a visual sign of surrender and a sign of weakness: a white banner and a yellow star.

And, of course, the mask is equated with the membership ticket of the Democratic Party (in fact, there are no such ones).

In addition, the universal symbol of the pandemic - the mask - distinguishes freedom -loving conservatives that do not wear it from the principle, from cowardly liberals that do not go out of the house without it. And this is the mask resembles car seat belts. I found a hot struggle against them when in the 1980s it was decided to impose them on everyone. This requirement turned into a grandiose and typically American discussion about the boundaries of permissible intervention in personal life.

- What is the matter of my life, who allowed him to protect it? - the fighters for freedom said.

They lost, and when the law reached our state, Bakhchanyan suggested releasing T -shirts with a painted belt so that the police did not cling. Now they are used to the belts, and everyone uses them, except for a few compatriots, like my brother-Libertarian, who prefers to sit on a fastened belt, but not succumb to the violence of state custody.

With masks-a similar story, but not in New York. The city votes for the democrats in the proportion of four to one, and almost everyone goes in masks. They became an elegant accessory of fashion, which blossomed on the shelves of street merchants. White masks are worn by people without complaints like me; Black - solid, for example, Biden; Others have fun and change them like gloves. Sometimes masks copy the masterpieces of New York museums, and then you meet a passerby with a “star night” by Van Gogh on the nose.

Ladies imitate other stars and wear a smile of Marilyn Monroe. Some go down the steps of evolution and put on a mask of their favorite dog, crocodile, even sharks. But the wife, without falling into extremes, stopped on a cat mask and constantly meets her own kind - people always envy cats.

Women, of course, learned to use masks better than men: for us they are an annoying obstacle, for them - a challenge to beauty. Covering the lower part of the face, the ladies with the help of skillful coloring - antimony, white and sparkles - invented (so loves to speak advertising) eyes and eyebrows again.

I already met this Arab makeup in Asuan, where I drove to inspect the monument to the Soviet-Egyptian friendship of the work of Ernst Unknown. Looking at the same time at the bazaar, I was amazed at the black merchants tightly wrapped in black, whose defiant charms managed to judge by unexpectedly lively eyes.

“Subtraction,” I understood then, “richer than addition: it distinguishes the necessary, cuts off the secondary and exacerbates the rest.”

This directly applies to New York from the Pandemia. Left idle, he moved from the offices to the sidewalk and is not going to leave it. Still without risking gathering inside, young people (old people walk in parks) sit tightly at the tables under umbrellas and heaters.

They cannot be understood. Public communication was the pleasure that we, after the months of isolation, learned to value no less than Robinson - Friday. I feel it on my own. Tired of quarantine with his hardworking, but monotonous loneliness, I wander aimlessly for hours on Broadway to just look at my own kind. People as a whole are a pretty race if they do not go into the crowd. I could not learn how to walk in the leg, stand in the ranks and get sick in the stadium. So I do not go to the election rally, even if like -minded people gather there.

But these days New York is a rally in itself, and if you eavesdrop on other people's conversations, they are all dedicated to one hero.

3.

In the center of the plot of the current elections, as expected, two characters. The first is Trump, the second is also, but the difference between them is huge.
The Trump, which votes, looks like an iconoclaster. He is fighting with Washington, where enemies of the common people who call themselves politicians dug. Trump is a man from the side, he plays by his own, not other people's rules to shake the burden of empty formalities and traditional tricks. At the same time, his supporters easily forget that Trump is the main politician of the country, which he leads for almost four years, which means he is responsible for everything that has cooked with her.

In the last election, Trump explained that only he could withdraw America from the swamp, where the Democrats had brought it. This time he says the same thing, only now he himself brought here the country.

To notice this unpretentious logical unreason, you must be in the camp of Trump's opponents. Their variegated coalition is made up of everyone who does not endure the president, including republican hasslers. All of them do not vote for Biden, who turned out to be a contender almost involuntarily and by accident, but against Trump. The president is not taken out because he is lying many times every day, sometimes without need and meaning. This is not a political, but a physiological disgust that does not need arguments, although they are just enough.

If you believe the surveys, the latter are more than the first, ten percent. Such a gap has not been for forty years.

But the fact is that neither the first nor the latter believe in surveys that completely compromised themselves in 2016.

“The fate of the elections,” the most careful believe, “in the hands of“ shy trampists ”, who publicly do not admit love for the president and remain silent when they are asked about him.

No one knows how many of them, and, most importantly, given the archaic electoral system, in which exactly they hid. From here - three days before the climax - anxious uncertainty and painful unpredictability.

But there is nothing to complain about - this is the freedom of choice that God or the Constitution endowed us with. In America, they are often confused.

New York