OPENING LINES

 We give you, loyal blog readers, a peek behind the curtain to see the Great OZ and how the sausage is made. 

On November 4, 2020, the day after election day, we will have one of two opening lines to the blog post. Before we reveal them, we should examine opening lines. Great novels and great writers have great opening lines. "Call me Ishmael" is the opening line for Moby Dick, a novel we are decidedly unenthused about and believe to be one of the most overrated novels of all time. 

Better opening lines for better books are "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times" for Dickens' a Tale of Two Cities. "Lolita, light of my fire, fire of my loins" in Nabokov's Lolita. "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting." The Sound and The Fury by Faulkner. "Howard Roark laughed." The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. "All this happened, more or less." Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. 

Next let's consider who will win. This statistic from the Democratic super-PAC Priorities USA: If Biden gets just three percent less from white working voters than he is now getting, and if just four percent of people of color do not vote then the electoral college vote is Biden 257, Trump 239, with Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania too close to call. 270 is needed for a win. For those of you who care, President Trump may well win Florida, which is a big problem for Biden. Florida is a statistical dead heat at the moment. We have seen insider polling.  So this election is far from over. 

Here is what we are currently thinking of opening the blog with, depending on who wins: 

Trump Win: "The End Of Democracy As We Know It Occurred In The United States Yesterday..."

Biden Win: "Our Long National Nightmare Is Over." Those of you who are of a certain age and historically acute (meaning not 98% of our robed readers) will recognize those words as the start of the peroration in President Gerald Ford's inaugural speech  as he addressed the nation for the first time after taking the oath of office.    

You see blog brilliance doesn't just happen.  Many of the posts are carefully planned weeks or months in advance, with words and phrases going through a rigorous editing process designed to produce a product we are justifiably proud of. Either that, or in a covid-gin hangover haze, we pound out something while sipping strong black coffee.