The cliché “level playing field’ has a pleasant lilt to it; it’s a sweet-sounding pair of trochees followed by a vowel-laden accented syllable. Fairness, it proclaims, should be a prerequisite. Unfortunately, the playing field of US politics is tilted way right – it’s warped, Daliesque, unsettling, at least for small-d democrats.  

For example, Wyoming has two senators; DC has zero, though more people reside in the District of Columbia than on the lone prairies of the Tumbleweed State. For me, it’s weird that the dispersion of a smattering of like-thinking people in the boondocks should have more say than a concentration of like-thinking people in urban areas, that folks in Albin WO (pop. 181) should have the same Senatorial representation of folks in the Bronx (pop. 1.435 million), but that’s the case, the plan from the get-go – though I doubt that a majority of the Founding Fathers would be happy with the rejection of Enlightenment thinking that characterizes the philosophies of many in the Hinterlands. 

To quote a song from the days of my youth that looped a lot on AM radio: “Something’s happening around here/ What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

I realize that Twitter is also skewed, the extremes getting more than their share of attention, but according to my Bloomsday^[1] feed, many Republicans tweeters are cheering for Putin in today’s summit today over Biden. 

Gimme a C, gimme a U, gimme an L, gimme a T.  What does that spell? 

Atavism. 

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^[1] 16 June 2021