If I Were President…

Plus, news about my latest book project

Well, here we are, less than a week to go before Election Day, and I’m full of anxiety and low-grade dread. I’ve revisited election night 2016, made a point of ignoring election news, and have rage donated to so many candidate my email inbox is flooded with solicitations. But I still have these uneasy feelings and I’m not sure what to do with them.

To take my mind off of things I can’t control, I’ve been thinking about what I would do if I were elected President of the United States. What would I change? What damage could I un-do? How could I erase the mistakes of the last four years?

I believe climate change presents the greatest threat to the planet. The fact that I feel compelled to couch that statement as a belief rather than a fact shows how deep the problem is. This should be the top story every day and the United States should be leading the way. Instead, we’re the laughing stock of the world because we’ve got a grifter president enabled by a feckless GOP.

So while I’d make climate change the focus of my presidency, it wouldn’t be my first priority.

Minority Rule

Here’s as astonishing paragraph I read in the New York Times daily newsletter yesterday.

“Over the past 32 years — a period that includes the naming of every current Supreme Court Justice — Democrats and Republicans have each held the White House for four terms. In six of those eight elections, the Democratic candidate won the popular vote.”

That means for the eight presidential elections that I’ve been old enough to vote in, more people have voted for Democrats than Republicans 75% of the time—but as we all know that’s not how it worked out. The GOP has known for some time that it doesn’t have the numbers to win fair and square. They’ve used the built-in inequities of the Electoral College to their advantage and they’ve made voter suppression and political disenfranchisement the cornerstones of the Grand Old Party.

And it’s worked. As a result, we’ve had the will of a few governing over many for far too long. This has got to stop.

So before I go on the offensive with climate change, the first thing I’d do is implement a series of defensive moves that address the problem of Minority Rule:

Make Election Day a National Holiday: This is a no-brainer. The best incentive for getting out the vote is to give people the time to do it. There are too many obstacles to vote. Let’s remove them.

Gerrymandering: The process of re-drawing district lines to help those in power stay in power is a huge problem. Maps of these districts reveal how contrived and downright racist the practice can be. Google worst examples of gerrymandering in your state and prepare to be appalled. How does one un-do gerrymandering? I have no fucking clue, but I’d figure it out!

Restoring voting rights: You can’t call the Republican project to take away the voting rights of Black men by means of a for-profit prison pipeline an aberration or even un-American. Disenfranchising Black men is what America is all about. It’s time to break with our racist past and change that once and for all.

Dismantle the Electoral College: I’m assuming you understand how the Electoral College works (I think I do but I have no idea why it’s a proper noun), but do you know why it was put in place? The Founding Fathers didn’t want the masses to have too much power. In other words, the Electoral College is fundamentally unfair and it’s always been this way:

“Historically, the Electoral College has benefited certain regions over others. In the early days of the nation, the Constitution counted enslaved Americans as 3/5 of a person. This not only increased the number of people representing slaveholding southern states in the House of Representatives but it also helped tip the scales in presidential elections to southern states. Five of our first seven presidents came from southern, slaveholding states.”

People have used this platform of “not all votes are created equal” to their advantage for centuries. That needs to end. Your vote should mean something no matter who you are or where you live.

Un-fuck the Supreme Court: I’ve seen a lot of discussion about expanding the Supreme Court. You know what I want to know? Why did Justice Anthony Kennedy retire? Why did his son, who works at Deutsch Bank, give Trump a billion-dollar loan? Who paid off Kavanagh’s debt and country club fee? These are questions worth answering, don’t you think?

Climate Change Universal Basic Income

The major mission of my presidency would be to address climate change. Biden has called himself a transitional president between Trump and the next generation of politicians. I’d do the same but for climate change. I’d bring in hundreds of climate scientists and policy wonks to get to work on how to undo the damage we’ve done to this planet.

No president can do that in one or two terms. It’s going to take a sustained global effort, but can I can be the president who gets people to change the way they think about climate change? Sure I can! I’d turn disbelievers into believers and believers into advocates. We need to leapfrog over activism and get to fucking work because we don’t have a lot of time left.

I would implement a hearts and minds campaign about climate change to win over the public and not make it a partisan issue, i.e. undo the brainwashing of Fox News.

How do we do that? By helping people who are at the front lines of climate disasters. I would institute a Climate Change Universal Basic Income (CCUBI). Anytime a state of emergency is declared in a region affected by climate change, a UBI goes into effect for everyone in that area. The governor of the affected state can work with the climate council to determine the severity of the emergency and the level of need, like rent forgiveness when you have to evacuate due to a wildfire or a hurricane, but you get the point. On my watch, climate change and climate assistance will go hand in hand. If this sounds like I’m talking about a branding campaign, you’re absolutely correct.

You can even give CCUBI a cute mascot, like a bear cub. That worked for forest fires, right?

Uh, maybe not…

Gun Reform

This one is personal. Ever since our friends’ daughter was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary on 12/14/12, I’ve been a passionate supporter of gun reform. Firearms are deadly weapons and having one in your house increases your likelihood of being killed with one, not the other way around. Here are the steps I would take:

Regulate everything: Owning a weapon should be as intensive as owning a vehicle. Are you fit to own a firearm? Is the firearm safe? Where did you get and how will you store it? Is your registration up to date? As president I will double the budget of the ATF and hire a shitload more employees because shit is about to get bureaucratic. I will make owning a weapon such a pain in the ass that people who don’t have their shit together won’t bother with the hassle.

To those who say it can’t be done I ask you this: have you ever tried to buy over-the-counter medication with pseudoephedrine at multiple drug stores? You can’t because even though you don’t need a prescription, you have to show your ID and sign a log. So if you try to buy up all the Sudafed in town so you can start your meth lab or try to buy a box in California one day and Nevada the next, you won’t be able to do it. The law varies from state to state, some are more strict than others, but if we can implement a nationwide database for cold medicine, we can do it for weapons and ammunition.

Ban assault weapons: We’ve been here before. The public agreed to ban them and the GOP un-banned them. Let’s set that straight. Oh, the reason why you won’t see defund the police as part of my platform is because the police will be in charge of enforcement.

Abolish open carry: If people want to march around with weapons they should join the Army. This Call of Duty cosplay bullshit has got to stop.

Cabinet

I haven’t thought about my cabinet yet but Annie has dibs on Chief of Staff. I will ask Alice Bag if she’d like to be the first punk laureate and if Greg Graffin would serve as Climate Czar.

My name is Jim Ruland and I approve this message. (Don’t vote for me.)

Feline Exits Soft Container

Pitchfork announced earlier this week that my next collaboration will be a book called Rumors of My Demise with Evan Dando of the Lemonheads.

After collaborating with a band for the last few years, I’m very excited to be working with a story filtered through a single consciousness. Variety is the spice of life and I’m looking forward to new stories and new challenges.

Evan is a songwriter whose fame has little to do with songwriting. Throughout his long career his looks, his drug use, his famous friends have all taken center stage. Yet through it all Evan remains a brilliant lyricist. It will be fascinating to explore all of this with Evan.

How did this come about? My agent introduced us and we hit it off. We wrote a proposal this summer and now here we are. It all happened very quickly, which isn’t typical (at least not for me).

The strangest thing about working with Evan so far is that he and I haven’t met. We’ve talked on the phone for hours and hours, but haven’t been on the same side of the country, much less in the same room together.

Hopefully, the new year will bring a new reality and we’ll be able to travel and go to shows and talk to our friends, new and old. Until then, where are my Lemonheads fans? Make yourselves known!

Dodgers Win World Series

I told you so.

The Caretaker Challenge

I love this story about how an obscure experimental artist’s 6.5-hour work about Alzheimer’s went viral on Tik-Tok. There’s a lot to unpack, but Meagan Garvey does it beautifully:

Arranged from edits of Jazz Age ballroom tunes found on forgotten 78s in dollar bins worldwide, the record is as dreamy as it is unsettling; to listen is to be stuck within the locked groove of someone else's distant memories. Kirby re-works these dusty samples to crackle and fade and loop indiscriminately, occasionally repeating themselves or abruptly changing course. Tracks are titled things like "The sublime is disappointingly elusive," or "I feel as if I might be vanishing." It seemed like the right soundtrack for the vertigo of the moment, that feeling of existing in a present outside of time – when I put it on and swayed around my living room, I'd sometimes pretend I had died long ago.