Good Down Home Vibrations With Reservations

I am deep in Trump Country. The young knucklehead down the way has risen to the height of local sophistication by piloting a big-ass pickup truck that makes a throaty racket and has a big American flag and a big Trump flag flying from its aft quarters. He looks rather like what used to be called a skinhead. He would love to fight you if you said anything about his flags.

There are Trump flags over on the Wildwood beaches. Knuckleheads there actually parade them around like it was a pageant of idiocy. There is nary a mask on the Boardwalk. Can't smoke weed with a mask on, after all. Or drink beer.

But here's the thing, at least to me. Looking back at 2016, two local “tells” have changed. I ride my bike along a two-lane blacktop called Golf Club Road and then hang a right on East Shellbay down to a fishing pier and a pavilion with a pagoda roof. It is quiet and all green and blue.

Now in 2016, the difference along Golf Club Road was that many of the houses there that were right on the golf course sported Trump signs. No flags or anything brassy like that because these are at least upper middle class people to whom that would be too unseemly. These people are not knuckleheads. They were sort of proper signs, like the ones you see down here saying “We support the police,” but they were nonetheless Trump signs along a golf course. Hmm. And I don't remember seeing any Hillary Clinton signs in Cape May County in 2016. Just Trump signs.

None along Golf Club Road this year – so far, although time is getting short. Maybe there's some buyer's remorse going on down here. After Trump was in Wildwood before the virus, the mayor of North Wildwood felt comfortable hoisting a Trump flag up with his American flag at his house. For one day. A friend who lives there told me he got too much heat. And in my virus-limited travels around the middle part of the county, I see far fewer Trump signs over all. The ju-ju ain't as bad. The vibe is different.

The Cape May County Herald is the so-called paper of record down here, run by a conservative knucklehead with vaguely good intentions, but the cool thing about the paper has always been a column called “Spout Off!” where people do exactly that, within reason and the libel laws. There are a ton of retired people down here with a lot of time on their hands and sometimes the Spouts run to three or four full pages in about eight-point type. You want to feel the pulse of Cape May County, read “Spout Off!”

Well, in today's paper there was a lot of pointed bitching about Trump. People are just getting fed up. There are still Trumpers sticking up for him, but their stuff is weak and rote. “Spout Off” is another Trump poll that is underwater. 

These are perilous times, though, day by day. The virus isn't going away, the economy is not coming back yet, and Donald Trump is still president. Yet the people are in the streets – but it's four months until November 3. We must sustain. Press on. Soldier on. 

Because, as the immortal Yogi Berra put it, "It ain't over 'til it's over."