Potential Victims

TIME Magazine published a big cover recently: Pete Buttigieg and his partner smiling in front of a house with the words FIRST FAMILY written in massive, serif font in front of them. It's a lovely sentiment, but it's not going to last long. Not with the Elections Monster back out there.

This is a scene in the early part of the horror movie when everything seems right: here is the pretty couple that everyone loves at school smiling for their prom portraits. This is the stage of the horror movie where all of the sexy teens are accounted for. Some are hard at work, being nerds, others are busy making out in the back seat of an IROC. It's not clear who will survive. The star quarterback smiling (Biden), the guidance counselor whose door is always open (Warren), the radical social studies teacher (Sanders), the prom queen (Gillibrand), the queen bee (Harris), the insufferably uncool principal (de Balsio)? They flit on screen in a montage, just long enough for us to see them as the long shot pans down the hallway, lockers closing, bell rung. Most of them will only share the screen for a moment, maybe utter a grand total of three words of dialog, before the bloodbath begins.

It's a long movie. The cast keeps growing, until one by one, almost silently, they start disappearing. And we all know the Monster will eventually show up.

[Top image: "Montpelier, Indiana" by navets is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ]