Election Night

 

Tonight is the night when our collective civic unconscious puts on its party dress and fuck-me shoes and comes slouching out of the swamp.  It is Democracy's Prom Night, and whether you wake up tomorrow full of fond memories and renewed hope, or face down, naked, in a pool of your own sick all hinges on the whim of nine low information, undecided voters in the People's Republic of Ohio.

Still, whatever the outcome, what the last 8,000 months of continuous campaigning has taught me is how completely we are now two separate countries living in a hostile, shotgun marriage. Time will change this of course (“A hundred years from now? All new people.” -- Anne Lamott) but until the nursery and the grave bulldoze American Conservatism onto the ash heap of history the lessons of this elections -- that one Party can run a successful campaign based almost entirely on bald-faced lies, unremitting obstruction, money and dodging honest questions...that the national media are mostly gelded dolts or complicit co-conspirators...and that either slightly more or slightly less that half of the voting public has absolutely no problem with this arrangement -- are deeply disturbing.

Because as one wag once said, we as a nation cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

We will become all one thing, or all the other.