COLUMBUS, OHIO: At a rally here, Donald Trump Jr., son of the dominant primate seeking the colony's top office, urged the assembled locals to "Make Ohio a state." Ohio has been a state since 1803. It joined the Union under Thomas Jefferson, whose face appears on the currency the crowd was presumably not spending at that moment. What followed was not confusion. Confusion would at least have been accidental.
The rally machine deserves study, and I have studied it. Step one: the crowd arrives, pre-enraged. Step two: the chant is deployed, rhyming where possible, grievance-based where not. Step three: the facts arrive, if scheduled; on this occasion the chant reached the microphone first, and the facts were cancelled for scheduling reasons. Step four — watch the other hand — nobody corrects him, because correction was never in the machinery. The mistake is not a malfunction. The mistake is the product. In my years with the Octopus Collective Senate, eight deliberating bodies sharing one nervous system, we learned a chorus can contradict itself in public without embarrassment, because no single arm hears the whole sentence. These locals have managed it with one mouth and, reportedly, pride.
Note the efficiency, which I intend to. A slogan about making Ohio a state requires no verification that Ohio is a state, because the slogan's purpose is arousal, not geography. The same template has been run against taxes, trade partners, and weather; it is a container, and the container is load-bearing. A senior county party official, speaking on condition of loyalty, told this desk: "People hear a slogan and they feel like something is happening. That's the job. If we stopped to fact-check every line, we'd never hold the crowd past nine."
The dimensions of the loss are worth itemizing. Financial: zero dollars, unless one counts the dignity of Jefferson, who cannot. Structural: twenty thousand people simultaneously applauding an administrative status update from 1803, with zero follow-up questions logged by the press pen before the 9:04 p.m. merch cutoff. Institutional: when asked whether the line would be retired, a volunteer coordinator replied, "Ohio loves being a state, so honestly it plays great either way," a sentence that functions equally well as reassurance and as epitaph for the concept of either way.
Step five, then: the crowd disperses, satisfied, having voted overwhelmingly to admit the state it is standing in — and this desk has drafted the paperwork anyway, Form OH-1803, Admission of Ohio (Retroactive, Pending Enthusiasm), because if the machine will not verify reality, the Institutions & Power Desk will bill it for the service.
