On the average Wednesday after Super Tuesday

It may seem strange, but Super Tuesday's result wasn't actually the worst outcome possible for the terrified majority who're currently freaking out about the possible reign of Dystopian future President, Donald J. Trump. Certainly, it was a pretty bad result, until you consider that some advance polls had him sweeping every states available, like the vengeful broom from the Sorcerers Apprentice.

So instead of Trump being the inevitable presumptive nominee, we now have him as just the almost-inevitable, presumptuous nominee. There is, mathematically speaking, a chance that he could be beaten, although considering that there isn't really a viable alternative candidate and he's projected to win in virtually every upcoming state, that hope seems more than a little forlorn.

For everyone hoping that Marco Rubio might have been able to staunch some of the arterial bleeding of the GOP's body politc, there was the last gasp victory in Minnesota, a victory which meant he won a state on just the 15th time of trying. That puts him slightly ahead of the people who haven't won a single state, Ben Carson, John Kasich, and 99% of America. Unfortunately, as our generation's Shakespeare, Taylor Swift, points out, "Band aids don't fix bullet holes", and Rubio undermined his own insistent rhetoric about being the only credible roadblock to a Trump victory by coming third in most of the other states, and not picking up any delegates in nearly every state that required candidates meet a certain threshold of votes.

That delegate math thing is really important, because it means that of 700 or so pledged delegates Rubio has just over 100, Donald Trump has 320, and even Ted Cruz, a man who looks like an anthropomorphic paper bag full of wet garbage has 225.

Ted Cruz, 2016

In the race to amass the 1237 delegates needed Rubio is falling behind, leaving him with less room to lose the states still in play, and without the moral high ground necessary for him to appeal to the rest of the field to drop out and unite behind him to tackle their true enemy.

And that's really important, because the accepted view is that nobody can possibly stop Trump until it becomes a one on one race. There's a indisputable scientific law called the 'Conservation of Ninjitsu' which is used to explain why a single ninja will be able to beat the hero, but as soon as multiple ninja's appear, they're all easily defeated. Under the 'Conservation of Ninjitsu', there is only a certain amount of competence and fighting ability to go around; in one person it's enough to make them a powerful force, but once it's diluted across the multitude, they're all weakened.

The same principle applies to the race to stop Trump, in that the anti-Trump vote hasn't been able to coalesce around a single candidate, with each taking away some of the support from the others. Inevitably, Rubio's people immediately blamed Ohio Governor John Kasich for stealing voters from the demographics most likely to support their man, but unfortunately declined to follow up with the accepted Ninja practice of slaughtering their enemies and eating their still beating heart to gain the strength of their foe. Although there's still time.

Now, though, for the first time, the Republican Party seems to have realized that in order to defeat Trump, they may have to team up with their old enemy, Magneto. Oh, wait, sorry, no, that's the plot of X2: X-Men United.

What I meant to say was that the Republican Party are suddenly looking to the only man they actively hate more than Donald Trump: Ted Cruz. 

The poor man's Magneto

To say that Ted Cruz is an unlikely hero for anyone to look to is really, really underselling how awful Ted Cruz is. If Donald Trump vocalises the populist view from the gutters of American intolerance, then Ted Cruz is the sewer that scum water drains into. Having based his campaign around winning over the kind of white, evangelical voters who're anxious to reject un-Godly concepts such as sex education for teenagers, vaccines for children, equal rights for gays, and taxes for anyone, he's been ignored in favor of the one guy running to the right of him on the hot button issue of immigration, an area where he struggles by being of both Canadian and Cuban descent.

Even his own colleagues in the party are reported to hate Cruz, the man responsible for the disastrous shutdown of the Government in 2013 over whether they should get money to run essential services. In recent weeks though he's been most damaged by the public perception that he's a liar and a cheat, to the extent that he was forced to fire his own head of Public Relations for misrepresenting Marco Rubio's comments that 'the Bible was a good book, with lots of answers', as "you won't find any answers in there."

Still, he's somehow found a place as the choice of voters who don't trust Trump's conservative credentials, and crucially he's won 4 states and 225 delegates, and that alone could be enough for his Party to grudgingly get behind him, however much they don't want to.

On the other side, Bernie Sander's equality and economic justice revolution was derailed by Hillary Clinton's campaign for "some equality and economic justice maybe, although probably not actually, thanks for voting tho anyway guys." Bernie picked up wins in Vermont, Colorado, Oklahoma and Minnesota (yes), while Hillary Clinton won the South by broadening her appeal to include voters who weren't white or under 25, the one demographic that Bernie had concentrated on. If his support in this age group holds firm then Bernie Sander's will almost certainly win the Democratic nomination, and the subsequent Presidential election.

In 2044. When he's 102.

This isn't to at all downplay what he's achieved so far, though, because in pushing Hillary Clinton to actually engage with voters and come up with some policies he may well have pushed her a hair closer to being a genuine liberal candidate, rather than a posessed mannequin with a nice line in pant suits. In reality, there's almost nothing wrong with Hillary Clinton that isn't also wrong with every other American politician. She's simply a disappointing standard bearer for the left, and when you stick her next to Bernie Sanders, a genuine progressive titan, with his own CD of protest anthems, and an ideology that excites people, she looks even less appealing.

I mean, let's face it, nobody is going to be travelling to Vermont to get a free tattoo of Hillary, are they.

A genuine thing that is happening

On Super Tuesday

Today is Super Tuesday, and I am Super Excited.

It may seem like this is an odd post to be writing, considering that my blogging has been so absent for the last year, and there are far more interesting things going on in my life at the moment.

I don't really want to say that this is the most exciting day of the year, because obviously that'll be Election Night. And then it'll be Super Tuesday. Also, Jalyss and I are having a baby so I imagine that'll be in the top 5 or so.

For those of you who aren't aware, Super Tuesday is part of America's horribly convoluted political process, whereby citizens elect their President by first voting on a candidate for each party in each state, which then sends a certain number of delegates based on an archaic algorithm sorted by population, state size, and which states each party finds most important. Each candidate tries to get enough of these delegates to secure the nomination, but delegates can switch to support other people, even if they're only really there on the basis that the people of their state voted for them to support a certain person, and some of them aren't democratically selected but are literally just people whose opinions are considered to be more important.

It's somehow both too democratic, and not democratic at all, culminating in a situation where someone can win the popular vote, or the majority of states, or even more delegates, and still not get the nomination.

And the cornerstone of this hastily built edifice is Super Tuesday, when roughly a quarter of states and a third of the delegates are selected. Basically, it's where campaigns to become to the Presidential nominee live or die. Lose big on Super Tuesday and you should probably drop out; win most and you're likely to win it all.

It's incredibly fascinating, especially because this year it's likely to lead to the coronation of two candidates who will somehow be both the most and least popular politicians running. Donald Trump, a hairpiece with a mouth, is hated by 60% of the population, to the extent that his own party is currently trying to work out how to run against him, while Hillary Clinton is loathed by 59% of the country, including a significant proportion of the population who believe she should be in jail for "crimes" she committed while Secretary of State.

Behind them come Marco Rubio, a young (-ish), Latino Republican running on optimism and compassionate conservatism, who would seem to be exactly what a party with historic difficulties in attracting minorities would want to be able to win an election, were it not for the fact that those difficulties steam from a significant part of the party who are just out and out racist.

That isn't hyperbole, by the way; 31 % of Trump supporters (and 21% of all Republicans) think that White's are a "superior race", a third support banning not just all Muslims from entering the US (74% support that idea) but also all gay people. 38% wish that the South had won the Civil War, and 20% disagree with the Emancipation Proclamtion, Abraham Lincoln's Presidential decree that freed Southern slaves during the Civil War. By any measure, those are pretty extreme and pretty racist, positions - sourced here).

This week, in an amazing display of pandering to racists, Donald Trump refused to disavow the former head of the KKK, then said he didn't know about the concept of 'white supremacy', then blamed a microphone for not immediately distancing himself from them. In fairness to him, this may simply be down to the fact that Donald Trump is convinced of his own personal supremacy over everyone else in the world, and his own skin tone is default Terracotta, with a tinge of Oompa Loompa.

Unsurprisingly, Marco Rubio is struggling despite being the choice of the majority of the establishment Republican Party , because it turns out having million of dollars, dozens of endorsements, and an actual coherent policy platform, as well as wide appeal to a broad base, and a photogenic, articulate charm, doesn't mean much if you're a little bit browner than Edward Scissorhands.

Scissorhands for President, 2016

Behind him, or sometimes in front of him, and this is where it gets difficult, because at some points all three candidates have claimed victory in a state where only one of them has actually won, is Ted Cruz.

There's a bit in Shrek where he inflates a toad to act as a balloon, and Ted Cruz looks exactly like what I imagine that toad to look like now. He looks like someone has deflated a fatter man.

Ted Cruz looks like a cheap rubber Halloween mask of Ted Cruz's face came to life, and is running a Presidential campaign on the platform of unending winter. I would not be surprised to learn that Ted Cruz is actually an animatronic being controlled by a small slug floating inside his watery centre.

Nearly 40% of people can't conclusively tell you that he wasn't a serial killer who operated years before his birth (source), which is a good indication of how little people like him. His own colleagues have refused to endorse him, and he's running on the campaign slogan of 'trusTED' whilst facing charges of sending potential voters fake letters from the state to vote for him or face fines, and of lying about whether other candidates were even in the race anymore.

Tell me, does that this looks like an actual human being? Or does it look like what an alien visitor to Earth might think a human being looks like having intercepted our radio signals for decades.

He's the Christian candidate. Actually, he's one of the Christian candidates, but Ben Carson is so irrelevant to this process as to not warrant anymore mentions than this single sentence.

One the Democrat side, Hillary Clinton has been forced to remember that she's supposed to be on the left of the political spectrum, as uber-Pensioner Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist who joined the Democract's 6 months ago just to run for President, has run a grass roots campaign based around reminding people that Capitalism is a bit shit if you let a few people keep all the money for themselves.

Now, Sanders has about a 0% chance of actually winning the nomination, but it's now got to the weird point of Republicans being able to legitimately call their potential opponent a socialist, a word that's thrown at anyone who's a bit left of Eisenhower in America. He is 'Boy Who Cried Wolf'-ing it, in that it's actually probably part of his appeal that the word socialist has been so undermined by years of using it to describe anyone at all, that now an actual Socialist is running, everybody assumes he's just another liberal.

He's the kind of raging extremist that would look fairly standard anywhere else in the world, what with his calls for such un-American abominations as paid maternity leave, free public education for all, and regulations on banks to prevent future financial crises. The maniac.

So this is what I'll be doing all night - following along with the updates as they come in on who has won what. And probably crying at who has won what.

On USCIS

It's 7:58am, and for one of the first times since I've arrived here there's a steady rain falling on me, and on the other few dozen people patiently stood waiting for the door to open. Even on an unusually grey day, this early in the morning, Minnesota hasn't yet got so cold that I bothered to pick up a jacket on my way out the door, so instead I balance a box of documents on my head until a Good Samaritanesque Rihanna invites me under their umbrella.

We are waiting for a USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services) processing centre, where I've been summoned to go for my biometrics. In preparation for me staying in the US the Government wants to harvest and catalogue all of the most intimate aspects of myself; my fingerprints, DNA, and probably my soul. Ostensibly it's so that they have this on file should there ever be a problem, for instance, if I abscond with all the benefit money I'm not receiving from them.

It's the kind of post-9/11 state overreach that should make natural conservatives screech about the boundaries and limitations of what Government has a right to take; about privacy, about safeguarding, about presumption of innocence. But it's only being taken from immigrants, so the total amount of a damn that they actually give is somewhat less than none.

In a display of Governmental irony the USCIS centre is based in a solitary wing of the ground floor of a Chinese restaraunt. If ever one building was the picture of American policy, this is it; zealously guarding the frontiers of a nation that Capitalism has already sold out and overrun. It's a truly ugly building, but very clean. Kellie is singularly impressed by this. I'm not; if anyone has access to the vast pools of cheap labour from abroad that they can exploit to keep it tidy, these guys do.

As the rain starts to slacken into the misty drizzle, and the horde forms itself into a natural, orderly line, I find myself feeling quietly content.

Honestly. Rain and queues. It feels like I'm home.

At exactly eight, the doors are opened and the crowd moves through - there's enough space in the reception for everyone to comfortably fit in, and so we move up to allow the end of the line to get out of the wet. It's an unhomogenous collection, a real American melting pot of ethnicities. The lady in front of me tells me she's from an East Asian country whose 'real', non-English, name is unintelligible, so I nod politely. She's with her sister-in-law, who's there to enforce the weight of American citizen approval. This, I've learnt, seem to be very important. Having an American with you lends an air of authenticity; you are not simply some over-the-fence, fresh from the dock illegal. You have contacts, American contacts, and so, by association, the presumption of legitimacy to be here.

Kellie is with me for today, and once the queue has made its way in out of the rain she joins me. I wave her over.

"Is that your wife" asks the American.

"Err, no. That's my Mother in Law". I reply. I am starting to wonder just quite what age a woman needs to be for people not to assume she's my wife. It's a really awkward question to ask unless you're pretty sure of an affirmative answer, but apparently Americans don't feel shame in the same way as normal people.

The biometrics itself is disturbingly simple. No tissue, blood or saliva samples, no invasive procedure. I didn't even need to pee in a cup, which is unfortunate because I had already bought one from home.

Instead, I simply had to give fingerprints, a short written record of my height, weight and eye colour, and have a photo taken. I had been worried about this at first, as I seem to have a hereditary disorder, passed down from my Mother, that makes fingerprinting me difficult.

Whilst on our honeymoon in Flordia we went to Universal Studios, which in part offers lockers and ticketing based on a scan of your finger. I eventually gave up using this service, and simply put Jalyss' hand to the screen each time, as whilst I could open the lockers to put everything in, they never seemed to recognise the same fingerprint by the time I returned minutes later.

Apparently though, the Government has better equipment and systems than a big business, because my fingerprints read correctly every time. Turns out that I do have them, after all. Who knew.

On the Police

"Hello" says the policeman "we've had a complaint about a child driving a truck at this address".

"Oh, hello" I reply. "Yes, that would be Mina".

I've been left in charge of Mina for the afternoon whilst Jalyss goes to work and Jim has a nice lie down. I am beginning to regret my benevolent stance on child care; I remain happy to do it up to the point where the police arrive at the door.

Looking after Mina is usually fairly easy. He wants to do two things when he gets home - drive his wheelchair or drive one of the cars. Half an hour before Jim had put him out in the truck, where he happily sits in the drivers seat and turns the steering wheel. With a block behind the front tyre and no way to reach the pedals he's arguably safer in the truck than he is in his wheelchair.

A few days before, on our last trip down the road with him in his new electric wheelchair, he ended up being carried back home after driving into traffic and biting me when I tried getting him out of the path of oncoming vehicles. I'm wary of allowing him out in his new wheelchair. I still have the puncture wounds in my arm from where he sank his teeth into it. Fortunately I had a tetanus shot before I moved to America. It's genuinely amazing that they foresaw the possibility of me being bitten by my brother in law. Thanks NHS!

Whereas we used to be able to at least keep up with him when he started playing chicken with an eighteen wheeler, Mina has just received two new wheelchairs to test out. Both are too big to stop, too heavy to hold and too fast to catch. So, he's basically in the wheelchair equivalent of Gypsy Danger, making preventing him from doing what he wants fairly difficult. This is especially hard when what he mainly seems to want to do is drive into things as fast and as often as possible.

So putting him in his wheelchair without containment procedures firmly in place is out. The neighbourhood kids playing across the road from us wouldn't stand a chance beneath the bone breaking wheels of the iron chariot. As I'm unemployed and sitting around the house all day, I've made friends with a few of the stay at home Moms. I don't want to jeopardize that by letting Mina crush their children into the lawn.

Instead then, we put Mina in the truck, and leave him to play at driving. Today, I had just bought him back in, and fixed him a drink.

A knock on the door, and through the screen, on the porch, a cop. His car is pulled up at the bottom of the drive. A passing neighbour has reported a child is in the truck, and the police have come to check it out.

As I'm currently here reliant purely on the patience of the Government, it's slightly worrying to deal with law enforcement at this point. I still haven't quite got over the idea that they may just rescind my stay, and send me home. Having the police appear on your doorstep is not what you ideally want under these circumstances.

"Are you in charge here?" he asks. Currently I am, but only by virtue of the fact that Jim is in bed, and I suspect would be even less pleased to see the police at his door than I am. I am, nominally in charge here, I suppose. For a house that's usually so full of people it suddenly seems the rest of the Zapfs have deserted me. Only Mina has dragged himself over to the door. He's heard the word truck and thinks the policeman is going to take him outside to continue driving, which is going to be a difficult moment for everyone.

I explain that I'm his brother in law and that whilst we do let him in the truck, he's unable to reach the pedal and drive. I'm asked who I am. His brother in law, I explain.

The policeman asks for my details. I AM ABOUT TO BE DEPORTED. I give them numbly, and then things take a downhill turn. "What's Mina's full name?" I have absolutely no idea. I know his first name, and his last name, but I am drawing a total blank. "What's your middle name" I ask Mina. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't answer me. He doesn't know his middle name either. The cop looks incredulous at our lack of knowledge.  

Still, as it turns out me not knowing my brother in laws middle name isn't actually a crime. And isn't even, in fact, the most concerning lack of knowledge. He asks me for my dates of birth, I give it, and totally confused him because it's in the wrong order. Despite me clarifying that when I say 22/12 I mean the 22nd of December, he writes 22 for the month. I am beginning to get less worried about whether or not I'll get arrested. A policeman who doesn't know that there are only twelve months in the year; he's probably not inclined to launch a wider investigation.

Transferring dates between English and American is an ongoing battle. For some reason whilst I can adequately translate that when the month and day is out of order, I just need to switch them for it to make sense to me, this is beyond many Americans. Every time I tell them my date of birth, and lead with 22, their eyebrows descend into a frown and start to smoke as their brain flails for the extra processing capacity needed to overcome the complexity of reversing a pair of two digit numbers. It is apparently a national failing; confronted with calendars that don't work America gives in. It's fortunate that the wars on drugs and terrorism haven't been joined by a War on Unexpected Dates, because it would be a short and unsuccessful one.

Confronted with a round birthdate for his square hole the policeman gives in and leaves with some unspecific warnings about letting children drive into the garage door, and an earnest reminder that if I do let Mina drive, I will end up being killed by him. I find it unlikely that I will, but as a middle class white guy, I trust that this policeman is there to do good, thank him and watch him leave.

As he pulls away, Mina tug on my trouser leg. He wants to go outside and drive. I close the door and decide that maybe we'll put him in his wheelchair instead.

On the DMV

"Is this your wife?"

The lady is pointing at my 16 year old Sister-in-law, who looks exactly as young as she is, and thus makes the very obvious age gap between the two of us more than a little too wide for comfort. Jaidyn is going very red.

"This is my sister in law, she just drove me here" I explain. This isn't 'To Catch a Predator'.

"Oh, I just thought, when you said you were together" the lady continues, oblivious to the embarrassment she's causing Jaidyn. I'm forced to cut her off to clarify, "No, we just came here together. We came here together in a car."

We're at the DMV, to register me for an American licence and for me to sit my theory test. The DMV, I'm realising, is where bureaucracy goes to die. You go in to speak to the greeter, who assigns you a ticket to talk to someone else, who gives you a form to take to a third. I'm pleased that I can do my bit for the stuttering US economy by providing employment for the population of a small town, but maybe one of them could do a little more towards the process, rather than pass responsibility on to the next in line.

Applying for anything in the US as a British citizen is a chore; routinely carrying a packet of documents containing my passport, my birth certificate and my VISA entry form, which are pored over, analysed and remarked upon at every stage. Today I've also brought my counterpart driving licence with me. This will turn out to be a mistake.

The lady taking my documents has never seen a counterpart driving licence before. The lady she is working with hasn't either. Nobody in the building has seen it before. My counterpart licence is the Turin Shroud of the DMV; people like it, but to quote In Bloom, they 'know not what it means'.

I only want to get on a computer so that I can sit the theory part of the test, 40 multiple choice questions about driving laws in Minnesota. There are some excellent bits of knowledge on there. One of the actions it suggests could increase road rage in others is forcing their car off the road. Presumably that's not the only reason to not force people off the road; just the most important one.

I've been studying for the last few days and am pretty confident. Jaidyn uses the drive over to test me. We get lost, leaving us plenty of time of study. Her main advice is to remember that Minnesota state law means I have to leave six feet of space when I pass a cyclist. Six feet, I mentally file that one away.

After nearly twenty minutes of investigation, I'm told that I can't get a licence today and will have to take the permit test. That's what I'm here for. I'm relieved to find that the licence I voluntarily provided to them won't disqualify me from starting the whole process.

The test begins with a routine example question asking me to identify the capital of Minnesota. I get it wrong. An inauspicious start.

The remainder of the test is routine. I have to get 90% of the answers right. Most are obvious, a few require actual thought to answer. One is a straight up true or false. Some have the fourth answer as 'All of the above'. In any situation where all of the above is an option, answer all of the above. It's always the correct answer. This is one of the ironclad rules of testing, along with 'read the question carefully' and 'if you don't know just guess'.

I read the questions carefully, I don't know but guess (correctly as it turns out), and finally I reach a question about the distance to keep from a cyclist. I know this one. Jaidyn's advice is going to pay off. I confidently enter the answer. Six feet of space. Wrong. It's wrong.

I mind-swear profusely.

Disbelief. Crushing, wincing disbelief. Jaidyn has lied to me. I am overcome with doubt. Can I complete this? Are all the answers she gave false? How do I even know what's ... oh, wait, never mind, the test is over. I've passed.

I reenter the casual flow of senseless paper moving. The nice lady who was so confused about my UK licence sends me back to the initial greeter with some papers, which I fill out, hand over and have returned along with a new ticket, to go see a new staff member. She takes my papers, then takes my photo and administers an eye test. I pass that one too, and I'm free to go drive.

In three months I can come back and get tested for a full licence. Jaidyn reminds me that this will be just in time for the infamous Minnesotan Winter, a perpetually capitalised event distinct from regular winter in both the length and severity of the season and the sheer amount of time everyone spends discussing it.

It's like living with the Starks, and I wouldn't be entirely shocked to learn that somewhere around Duluth there may well be a giant ice wall manned by grim, black clad watchers, defending the US from all the wild men, mammoths and ice zombies Canada throws at them.

In the meantime we leave. I'll have a licence sent to me soon, and won't have to carry my customary ID bundle. We set off, and I start to tell Jaidyn about exactly how far from a cyclist you have to be.

Because it definitely isn't six feet.