What Would the Big Bossman Do? Mitt Romney is Going to Drag "Hope and Change" Away Tomorrow Night Just Like a Car Dragging a Casket Behind It

Probabilities are not predictions. On the eve of the 2012 presidential election, the prediction markets and experts such as Nate Silver have Obama winning with a probability of 86 percent 91.4 percent. But, this has not trickled down to the true believers in Romneyworld who believe that many dozens of national and state level polls are rigged, and that riots are going to break out in the United States--led by the "urban" population--when their candidate wins tomorrow in a landslide.

Progressives and Democrats are also nervous as well. Could Obama, the country's first black president somehow get reelected after a horrible first debate performance, in a slow to recover economy, against the Right-wing propaganda machine, and a significant public who are obsessed with getting the black guy out of office?

I am very nervous about tomorrow's election. I still believe that Romney, despite the mathematical and statistical evidence to the contrary, is going to win. It is true that conservatives and the White Right are engaged in all manner of magical thinking in order to convince themselves that their candidate is actually ahead in the polls, and the evil "liberal" media have conspired against Romney to suppress the truth.

However, a healthy cynicism based on cultural, historical, and racial memory is also a valuable insight into these matters of the political and the social for black Americans, people of color, and white folks who are similarly gifted.


Black Americans are a people born of a set of historical absurdities and happenstances which are better suited for a science fiction novel than an empirically grounded historical treatise. Tens of millions of us were stolen from African, transported around the world against our will, placed in waterborn coffins and death ships during the Middle Passage, then helped to birth modernity, created the Black Atlantic, were denied full citizenship in the world's "greatest" democracy, and then fought and struggled to improve that society for all people.

And then one of these anti-citizens would eventually ascend to be elected President of the United States while his people continue to be disadvantaged relative to white folks, and his tribe still honors and loves him. A deft scribe could not spin such a story out of the creative ether and have it be believed by anyone. But alas, we are here.

In my professional wrestling as politics series of posts, I have tried to point out how the absurdity of what happens in the ring is a neat parallel for the world of politics and the 2012 election. I have a few more posts left to do regardless of who wins tomorrow. But, in reflecting upon our collective anxieties about tomorrow--when an Obama win should be in the metaphorical bag--I kept thinking of the feud between the Big Bossman and the Big Show.

It went on for months and involved some of the most tasteless (and entertaining moments) of the Attitude era in the WWE. I loved this feud. I fondly remember my friends and I having a running joke where we would mimic Big Show chasing down his father's casket while the Bossman dragged it behind a car.

I have an eerily prescient feeling that Mitt Romney, through cheating, subterfuge, voter intimidation, and how his deep mastery of the politics of white racial resentment on a level fitting for a political necromancer or dark mage--will enable him to win tomorrow.

Hope and change is going to be driven away like a casket being dragged by a car...and Obama's supporters are going to be chasing it down before being thrown off into the dirt. Mitt Romney is going to drive that car straight to the White House.