Dear Family, Friends, and Diary,
For US democracy, is it sunrise or sunset? I can't tell and it has me worried, very worried. We have a contest between an avowed fascist and a good person. That should be all that the good people of America need to know. Do we have enough good people?
When we lived in Germany, we took visitors to The Documentation Center in nearby Nuremberg to learn:"... the causes, coherence, and consequences of National Socialism. It described the Nazi Party Rallies and explained the fascination they exercised upon participants and visitors." No one can have visited the Center and fail to see the parallel with Maga Trumpism.
Roughly 160 million voters are expected to turn out for next week's elections, about half endorsing fascism. Win or lose, that constitutes a discouraging development in American democracy. More so if their presidential choice wins, but also if they keep control of the House of Representatives or win the Senate majority. Eighty million American voters hope for a dictator and rubber-stamp representatives. We would be left to hope that the military remembers their oath to the constitution, or citizen suppression and non-citizen expulsion will spark unprecedented domestic violence.
Can it happen? It happened in our last neighborhood and those German folks were not so different from current Americans. They followed a Pied Piper offering a return to the good old days: "Make ---- great again." Old days were never as good as depicted, certainly not for "the others".
Hyperbole? I hope so. What do you think?
OK, enough doom and gloom (at least until next week). I ended the last diary with the hope for "something more interesting" to report. Not sure I can say that happened.
Our most picture-worthy event was nephew Adam's tennis match at nearby Fresno Pacific University. The University of California at Santa Cruz Banana Slugs joined a half dozen other school teams, all with less-interesting mascot names. We watched Adam's hard-fought singles match on Friday. I think we constituted the entire UCSC cheering section, except for players and coaches. who would occasionally call out "Go Slugs". Go indeed. Pictures were fun in any event.
Walk, serve, return. Lookin' good.
Coach's postmortem.
Cheering section and post-match pose.
While Adam's Friday result was disappointing, he returned the next day for a singles victory and a pair of doubles wins. Congratulations!
We wrapped up Friday with a nice dinner. We had hoped to celebrate Marianne's XXth birthday up in Yosemite, but there was no room at the Ahwahnee Lodge, so we settled for a local meal at Max's, a tried and true table-cloth restaurant. Good meal. Good company.
Our other family weekend encounters came via Zoom. On Saturday we joined Brian and Geoff for our weekly chat-and-Codenames session. We don't seem to get dramatically better at the game, but chatting is the highlight in any event.
Sunday saw our monthly remote meeting with cousins. Tim checked in from Lisbon, Marietta from Seattle, and Tom and Kathleen from Boise. It was an hour-and-a-half of news, laughs, and a bit of (political) gallows humor. We all vowed to join Tim in European exile if the wrong side wins. At least we are thinking about it.
And that was it. Still not a wonderful travel diary, but we promise more colorful entries from Thursday (Halloween) and next week (Death Valley).
Stay tuned,
John and Marianne.