In The Wake

It ain't over 'til it's over. And even then, according to Peter Thiel, it won't even be over then. If you're not familiar with Mister Thiel, you might recognize him from his net worth: Two point seven billion dollars. This is how Forbes Magazine prefers to introduce him, which sort of figures since that is how that particular publication tends to recognize their profile candidates. For the record, I have yet to be contacted regarding the piece I expect they might never get to on the portfolios of urban elementary school teachers. I prefer not to view myself as a number but rather a series of quirks and odd habits that make reading this blog entertaining if not financially rewarding.
But I digress.
Peter Thiel is a cofounder of PayPal, so if someone asked me how he made all of his money I would imagine that a portion of those little fees that get attached to PayPal transactions end up in his pocket. His ever-expanding, bulging pockets. He was also one of the first major investors in a little startup called "The Face Book," or something like that. One of the ventures that he is invested in is Palantir, a data-mining firm that uses its resources for such diverse tasks as finding lost children, aiding the homeless, and it's funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. 
So?
So Peter Thiel is a big supporter of Donald J. Grump, and he recently insisted that, "No matter what happens in this election, what Trump represents isn’t crazy, and it’s not going away." In case you're keeping score, it is kind of crazy, but he is right that it probably won't go away anytime soon. There are a few people with a lot of money who would very much like to see the kind of world Donald Yerump would like to visit upon this earth. Happily, for the moment, there are many more of those billionaires who would like to see those big capital T's torn down and have a few condos put in their place. 
But the poison is already in the water hole. The place where we will all be drinking for the next four, eight, eighty years. Making America great again means something different to those kind of people. The ones we live with. Some of them might be next door. It would be nice if all the billionaires would spend their fortunes curing disease and building hospitals and figuring out how to get a solid connection to Al Gore's Internet on the moon, but there are some who are hoping to build a wall. Or bouncing us back to a "better time" when locker room talk was all the rage and those who got were the ones who got even more. The rich get richer, that's for certain, but they don't seem necessarily to get any smarter.