How about a suggested topic in the interests of peace and tranquility for your loving family conversation around the blessed Thanksgiving table today?
Here it is: Hillary Clinton received 2 million more popular votes for president than Donald Trump, giving her 48.1 percent of the vote to his 46.6, and providing her a popular-vote margin exceeding that of John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon in 1960 and of Nixon over Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and of Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford in 1976.
Boy, that's interesting, isn't it?
It was the sixth time in the seven presidential elections since 1992 that more voters chose a Democrat than a Republican.
You could begin your discussion with the electoral college, our founders' creation to preserve the nation as a federation of equal states, and a device that delivered victory to the popular vote-losing Trump only because he narrowly won pluralities in three key places--Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Clinton won smashingly in one place, California, which gave her a margin twice that of her national margin.
It's like the World Series, which is a collection of seven equal baseball games, not a compilation of runs scored over seven games.
The Cleveland Indians actually tied the Chicago Cubs in runs scored in the series, 27-27. The Cubs won the world championship because they got an eighth run to Cleveland's seven in the seventh game.
That seventh game is like, say, Pennsylvania. The first game, which Cleveland won 6-0, is like California.
Should we continue the electoral college or should we not? Should we let an individual voter in Michigan count more than an individual voter in California? Discuss among yourselves. Pass the gravy.
I said pass, not hurl.
Here's another angle for discussion: Angry right-wingers, if I might be redundant, scoff at Clinton's popular-vote victory because it was provided by California, a liberal region they disdain and dismiss.
But Californians are Americans too. And I could as easily make the point that Trump's electoral win was provided by states of the old Confederacy, the only region ever to secede from the rest of the country and wage a deathly war against it.
If one side can argue that California doesn't count, shouldn't the other be allowed to argue that the old Confederacy doesn't count--if we're going to be arbitrary and discriminatory about it, I mean?
If you remove the old Confederate states from the electoral competition, Hillary wins the electoral college by 232-157. That's not even close.
Pointless, you say? Moot, you say? Offensive, you say?
All right, then. It's pointless and moot, I'll agree. But it's no more offensive than saying Californians don't matter.
Alas, one fellow wrote to tell me to move to California if I loved it so much. I explained to him that California indeed has some Edenic places--Pasadena is one, Santa Barbara another--but that enlightenment is more urgently needed in the old Confederacy.
Anyway, all my stuff is here. And loved ones. And Arkansas has some Edenic places of its own, such as my backyard, mesmerizing this season with yellow and crimson Japanese maples.
Here, then, is the ultimate point for discussion: Is any of this relevant, considering that rules are rules and Trump won by them?
I'd answer that yes and no.
It's not relevant to the extent that some people are trying to make it relevant by proposing generally that we abandon the electoral college and specifically that we mount a petition effort to get electors in Trump states to vote instead, as is within their power, for Clinton.
Neither is going to happen. Abolishing the electoral college would require that Congress refer a constitutional amendment, which Republicans in Congress won't do because their only chance anymore to have a president who would nominate the Supreme Court justices they want is that very electoral college.
Anyway, we'd need to abolish the U.S. Senate while we were at it, considering that it gives every state two seats no matter the number of voters those seats represent.
Let's put out of our heads the bogus banality that we're a democracy. We aren't.
But that Clinton received 2 million more votes than Trump is indeed relevant in one vital way: Trump takes the presidency with no remote semblance of a mandate for a right-wing revolution with Jeff Sessions undoing civil rights at the Justice Department and Steve Bannon infecting the presidential ear with dreams of white nationalism.
It is the electors who will give Trump the presidency on Dec. 19.
But it is all the people--including the greater number who voted against him--to whom he should be accountable after his inauguration on Jan. 20.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/24/2016