Darryl E. Owens: Cheap bleach and polarized politics don’t mix at discount store

Politics makes strange bedfellows — especially when enjoying a quickie at the Dollar Tree.

Lesson learned Independence Day weekend after I popped into the discount store for some cleaning supplies.

As luck would have it, I chose precisely the moment that only the manager was on duty and every Apopkan felt it his or her duty to replenish their stashes of secondary-market Twizzlers.

With the line snaking around the open register, I stood, sighing, clutching my counterfeit Clorox.

After several minutes of plodding forward, my fellow discount detainees’ patience cracked.

“Maybe we’ll get out in time for the fireworks,” quipped one patron.

Another customer tested her wit.

“Maybe Hillary [Clinton] will be in jail by the time we get out.”

DUN DUN DUUUUN!!!

Politics.

Usually, when it’s time to check the political barometer, I visit the barbershop for fresh insight and a fresh bald fade.

This wasn’t Uptown Barbers. Still, with my Words with Friends friends slow on the draw — I craned my neck to listen in.

“Crooked Hillary,” continued the middle-aged white woman, “took $25 million from the Saudis.”

Indeed, that’s what presumptive GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump wrote last month after the Pulse shootings:

“Crooked Hillary says we must call on Saudi Arabia and other countries to stop funding hate. I am calling on her to immediately return the $25 million plus she got from them for the Clinton Foundation!”

“Really?” interjected a graying black guy in a jazzy chapeau.

No, not really — if you trust PolitiFact. The Pulitzer-Prize-wining fact-checking group recently disputed that figure and the connective tissue linking the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Then, facts become mangled as if conveyed through the childhood game of telephone by the time they reach the voting class.

“Make America great again,” she said.

Just then, a guy in a wife-beater with guns swollen enough to discourage rebuking his blue language exploded.

“F– Trump. He don’t care about black, brown or nobody. All he cares about is making money.”

The conversation in a bargain store played nationally out in a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll. Alarm described what 61 percent of Americans felt about the casting call for the White House. The prevailing issues, jobs and the economy and terrorism and national security, largely are muted by ennui and dread over picking over what many consider an unappetizing plate of democracy with a Morton’s fork.

“On one side, you have Hillary, who [was] being investigated by the FBI, and then you have Donald Trump, who has diarrhea of the mouth,” as Jay Brooks, an Alabama engineer, put it in a post-poll interview. “I don’t think either of them are electable or would be a good president.”

He isn’t alone.

In May, Huffington Post polling found 54 percent of voters reckoned Clinton would prove either a poor or a terrible president. The Donald fared only slightly better; 53 percent predicted he’d sink.

Similarly, the latest Monmouth University poll found Clinton carries an anemic 36 percent favorable rating; Trump manages only a 28 percent favorable rating. Worse, many potential Clinton voters would vote less for Hillary than against Trump.

“About one in seven voters would like to cast their ballot for a third party candidate,” said Patrick Murray, who directs Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Fittingly, a new survey by Public Policy Polling unveiled a dark horse.

Potential voters were asked: “If the choices for President were Democrat Hillary Clinton, Republican Donald Trump, and a Giant Meteor hitting the Earth, which would you choose?”

The results? Let’s just say, “Tippecanoe and Killer Asteroid Too” might contend with a better ground game.

Hopeful supporters have drafted the space rock — which boasts near-even backing among every political stripe — for a third-party orbit, launching a Twitter feed on behalf of Sweet Meteor O ‘Death: #SMOD16.

I can’t wait for the debates.

Suddenly, the cashier catches my attention. I’m up. I pay, grab my sacks and head home.

At the door, I steal a last look at my strange bedfellows, still parrying. Just to my left, I notice a shelved book whose unpropitious title confirms the gods of irony are scripting this political season.

“The End of the World.”

___

Award-winning former Orlando Sentinel columnist Darryl E. Owens now serves as director of communication at Beacon College in Leesburg, the first higher education institution accredited to award bachelor’s degrees primarily to students with learning disabilities, ADHD and other learning differences. Views expressed are his own.