Fuck me, that was a tough beat.
I've been in a daze since election night, finding myself wandering around aimlessly like it's The Day After and we're all victims of a catastrophic nuclear war. It's probably good practice for the real thing, I suppose, in case my streak of bad luck continues and I don't get vaporized instantly.
The news from the transition team holed up in Trump tower over the last two weeks is enough to convince even the most lighthearted and well adjusted optimist to drink himself to death in the corner of a dark room, all while Hillary Clinton's popular vote advantage continues to grow and it becomes increasingly evident that she will still never be President despite amassing more votes than any of the white men to ever run for that job.
Jesus, an incredibly tough beat.
That is not to say that I'm convinced Clinton will join the ranks of George McGovern or Al Gore as one of the Greatest Presidents America Never Had, but when you consider that their failures just left us to contend with Richard Nixon and George W Bush it feels like they got it easy. Dick and Dubya were crooks and fools, offensive in their own right, but the clouds lowering on us this inauguration day are some horrifying new thing indeed.
To be honest, the results were less depressing for me than they were disappointing. I've long been an American Enthusiast who held that there was a trust - a faith - that came from the stirring oratory of Lincoln or Kennedy or Sorkin, that our neighbors may be zany from time to time but they were, on the whole, a genuinely good and well-intentioned people. "If there is hope," a much younger and more foolish version of myself once wrote a million years ago, "it lies in the voters." Well so much for that, ho ho!
As it happens, this election has bereft me of that trust, and I fear it has left me for good. I've lost the faith, it seems, and that's been the most disturbing feeling of all to reconcile. True, as the white trash descendant of other working class white trash, I'm not unsympathetic to the voters who felt alienated by a triumphalist Democratic campaign seemingly tone deaf to their experience....but to hitch their wagon to the star of a compulsively lying abusive egomaniac? It's unconscionable, and I am completely unable to empathize with anyone willing to throw their lot in with the Reichsleitung of the American Nazi Party.
In fact, it's become impossible for me to shake off the feeling that this is the twilight of the age of liberal democracy itself. Eight years of progress - and so much more besides - are about to be wiped out by the DC Chapter of the Klan, backed and enabled by hopped up little weasels like Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus. In all likelihood, we are living in what will be remembered - at best - as the start of a lost decade that will be the subject of books written for the next century...assuming the written word survives that long.
At any rate, the repercussions of this election will be felt by everyone. The world turns its lonely eyes to Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel as perhaps the last vestiges of sanity and good government left in this world, but already synagogues, mosques, and black churches across Canada have been vandalized. Marine LePen is re-energized in the Presidential polls in France. The unchecked racial aggression unleashed after Brexit continues unabated as Theresa May sits at Number Ten and unprecedented, wide scale harassment of anyone who looks vaguely brown has exploded across entire continents. It's all coming apart at the seams.
Enough.
Enough mourning. Enough uncertain confusion. Enough complacency. I should confess something perverse to you now, dear readers, before we go any further: in addition to the depression and disappointment and malaise, there's a small part of me that's excited, aroused even; spoiling for a fight. The Bush-43 era helped me discover and define my own liberalism, and now some deep part within me has been given new purpose.
Perhaps it's an opportune combination of time, experience, and not caring if an aggravated alt-right shithead from Twitter wants to try and blow up my car (joke's on him, I don't own a car), or perhaps it's the potential to feel useful again. Whatever it is, I am suddenly energized. When Clinton was going to be the next President of the United States we stood on the verge of a new golden age in liberalism, but now it turns out we're going to have to go back to fighting for it.
So let's fight, then. There's nothing I enjoy more than a good righteous shout in the dark, and frankly the more outnumbered I am the better I feel doing it. It's time for courage, grit, and new battle cries. These people are either monsters or in league with them and they deserve nothing less than for us to hound them to their graves, oh yes indeed.
