They did not listen when we warned them over and over again that the Right was playing with a dark and terrible fire.
And now that fire is here.
From the New York Times:
TRUMP TRIUMPHSGood night and good luck.
Shocking Upset as Outsider Harnesses Voters’ Dissatisfaction
Donald Trump Is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment
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...but I don't WANNA go on this ride! It's all broken and rickety and parts are falling off and and and ...oh, fuck me...
~>X'(
My historical radar went red.
Everyone is telling me to calm the fuck down, including my Canadian ticket to the north land.
Sorry, brother Drift, but I'm blowing this gin joint. It'll take a while, being as I'll have to dis-assemble my business. Which, while I did it so many times in-state, seems effortless compared to sneaking across the Canadian border with a shitload of inventory. Or fucking worse, begging on the mercy of that honey in India, maybe landing a gig at a call center as a for-real American.
I'm so fucked.
Fucked we so are.
Dear Driftglass,
Thanks for all the schnapps.
Seriously, I enjoyed you.
But now I have to quit.
I'm going to die if I look at blogs at the rate I'm going. My cortisol levels are sky-high. They're likely to remain that way for some time.
No amount of snark, or funny asides, or amusing anecdotes or factual history can make this OK.
Because we've just erased more than 80 years of history tonight.
So I guess I'm saying...I'm done. I'm a white man in Tennessee, whose liberalism amounts to a hill of beans and a early grave. I can work on the margins but this...
This...
I hope this is formative for some people. That their rights are not sacred. That their bodies are not temples. That when institutions we take for granted, when they are torn down...we recognize that they had value.
But instead, I see the media coddling Trump and his rage-baby progeny for eternity, because that's where the meal-ticket is and if that leads to Putin knowing the Nuclear Football codes, who cares?!?! It's such an INTERESTING story that I'm DELIGHTED to be a part of, LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL~!
I'll remember to remind my wife's family members, after the New Holocaust has started, or when the bombs have started landing, that at least we don't have to fear improper email handling.
We, as a nation, are truly fucked.
I wish I could be more eloquent, and perhaps after a day or two I will have something more substantive to post. But for now, I can see no up side to the latest turn of events.
Except the South has moved to Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania
Same to you Brother Drifty.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, but this tastes like puss.
In a daze, stunned with thoughts that this country is truly deeply this stupid. The left has lost the supreme court for a generation, the ACA is most likely to be repealed, cuts on services and social security coming. But maybe we'll have a big fucking wall to crow about. It is idiocracy.
I woke up with this weird feeling that I couldn't initially place, but that felt eerily familiar. I started running though my emotional data banks to see if I could find a match. Hangover? No. Anger? No. Sadness? Sort of, but not really. Then I finally hit on a match from about 25 years ago -- this is the numb, stunned, listless, staggering feeling I woke up with when I was 16 the night after the first girl I (thought) I was in love with dumped me. I don't say that to trivialize the feeling -- on the contrary, at the time, being 16, and having poured my heart out to her, it felt like the world was collapsing around me. It had taken place at a party, and so there was an added element of public humiliation, particularly since a couple of people apparently knew it was coming and were there to witness it, and so the next morning I couldn't stop my brain from coming back again and again to the thought, "why didn't they tell me?" But that was the furthest extent of my thinking -- mostly I just sat around the next day unable to think, unable to conceive of any future, trapped in an eternal present where it felt as if that feeling was going to last forever.
And so this morning. I've tried a few tinmes to make a feeble projection into the future about....what? The Supreme Court? Environmental Protection? Our black and brown brother and sisters? SociaL Security and Health Care? Our reluctant Empire? And every time my mind reels at the possibilities and uncertainties, forced to retreat from the darkness back to that feeling of numbness.
All this time I've been thinking that the core Trump supporters had wrapped themselves in this cocoon of misinformation and mutually reinforcing fear and loathing, woven from hate radio and the Digital Der Sturmer that is Breitbart. And that yesterday was going to be the moment when reality cut through the protective layer revealing the writhing and putrid larva inside that would shrivel and expire when exposed to the light. Well, turns out they were gestating Mothra.
Right now, my happy place is one of the last episodes of Cheers, where Frasier, as an experiment, tries to get Woody elected to City Council. The episode ends with Frasier waking from a nightmare of Woody and Kelly taking the presidential oath of office, followed by a mushroom cloud.
I have disdain enough to go around, from Karl Frisch and Stephanie Miller smugly talking about increasing gay rights being "inevitable" to the punditocracy treating Trump's campaign as a joke until he got into a position where he could win. And all that talk of the Republicans' becoming a regional party and not holding national office again? Either the media doesn't know what they're talking about or they've been lying to us for at least the last 20 years.
I was a lot younger when Reagan was elected and Bush was installed. Assuming America continues on its pattern of letting the incumbent serve two terms, I will be in my 60s before and if even poor whites decide to let a Democrat in to clean up the mess the Republicans will make, maybe my late 60s if the oldest man to take the Oath of Office dies during his first term and people (with the help of the press) decide that Mike Pence seems reasonable and he wins twice on top of finishing Trump's first.
Aside from defunding PP, neutering EPA, and some sort of immigrant gulag, nobody including Donny knows what is in store for us. We are entering Trumpland.
I'm having a hard time fathoming his win. Disenfranchised steel town ghouls doesn't explain this. It is the population entering the heart of darkness because the door was opened.
This is someone else's mess to clean up. I've been on the losing side of every battle since Nixon's inauguration. Good luck.
Words fail me. I'm sick & depressed. This is just frightening. Run visit your favorite Natl Park & kiss it goodbye. There's some giant corporations just itching to get that land. Say bye bye to the EPA which is somehow "ruining" the lives of ChristoFasxists out in meth land. Wave buh bye to Social Security & Medicare which are also taking away our freedumbs & Liberty. And so on. We are totally screwed. Beyond redemption. I hope all those Never Hillary fake progressives live to reap this whirlwind that they enabled.
As I told you before, goodbye. I can't be sure if my destination is another country or the Undiscovered Country beyond life, but I no longer call myself American.
It was nice while it lasted.
Well, I awoke to find that women, members of the LGBT community, and minorities were now officially second-class citizens.
Oh, and a woman's right to choose and my right to vote as a Black man may be on the chopping block. 20 million people will find that their healthcare is in jeopardy. The media may soon find themselves under much harsher scrutiny. Climate change? Hah! There will be no action on climate change. And the KKK will be back in the White House.
But Jill Stein is sooooo happy that she'll get to see the "cracks in the system".
Fuck.
Thanks, brother Driftglass. I understand those who are getting out while the getting is good, but I'll be sticking around. Not a whole lot of other options at the moment.
At least in four years, when the budget and landscape look like Cherynobl and the economy makes us long for Kansas' current one, when all of the rubes that voted for The Trumpenfuhrer are crying "Where's our jobs? Where's our privilege?", we can say, "we told you so..." And then we'll be arrested for protesting the state and thrown in some gulag somewhere.
Fuck this facist piece of shit. I will let myself despair today, but we have to fight for our and our children's future.
I hope that you and Bluegal and the kids are well, and taking comfort in each other. Know that there are a number of us out here that take comfort from your strength.
Poor Hillary. The worst is yet to come for her.
The Pretty Hate Machine worked to perfection, did it not?
http://www.starwars.com/video/so-this-is-how-liberty-dies
This isn't my first go around and I won't be the goat bleating against the snowstorm....but we missed something. We missed something big. Maybe we were the ones in the bubble all along.
The "demographic shift" we all go on about looked us in the eye last night and said No Thank You.
Rural White America showed it can still win elections, there is no diminishing power here.
The Rust Belt is now mostly Republican territory.
Paul Ryan is now one of the most powerful men in DC.
The media/pundit class is updating their resumes' with "King Maker."
Republicans no longer need to run traditional electoral campaigns.
Since 2008, the only "populist" uprisings that have succeeded are those supported and conforming to the wants of the 1%.
Worse of all, when 50 million+ voters are poorer and less secure in 4 years....it will still be the fault of liberals and Trump not being conservative enough....all the "I told you so" isn't going to change that.
Maybe we were the ones in the bubble all along.
I am in despair. AS a female, with a lesbian daughter, I am sick to my stomach with fear.
As of this morning the Jill Stein vote, which I presume was not pulling any Republican votes, would have tipped Michigan, New Hampshire (both still not called on MSNBC), and very nearly Pennsylvania. Of course it should never have been close enough to matter. Now we get to find out what the Republicans will dare to do when they can't be stopped. We need to know how this happened, why the models were wrong.
Yesterday, Election Day, I had the misfortune of watching Leonardo DeCaprio's documentary for National Geographic - Before The Flood. A beautifully made film laying out in detail how much worse the catastrophe of climate change is than you thought.
You owe it to yourself to find it and watch it. Here's a start:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/before-the-flood/
I say "misfortune" because I woke up this morning to the narcissistic-personality-disorder-with-the-attention-span-of-a-gnat just elected president who has twittered:
"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
All of the stupid things Trump has said or twittered, all the stupidities the GOP RWNJ and their plutocratic patrons seek [tax cuts for the rich, ban abortion, go after Social Security and Medicare and the ACA, and all the rest of it] pale before the reality of climate change.
DUNNING-KRUGER INDEX: 47.5%
Anger, fear, & despair can all be wholesome emotional events - & they all need to be handled with care because they can all turn toxic.
The forces of cultural morbidity snatch another victory from the jaws of defeat ... so why did all the triumphant MAGA aristocracy mashed together on that stage last night look completely scared shitless?
I think I know why.
History, geopolitics & ecology tend not to give out mulligans or do-overs.
If liberalism can muster sufficient discipline to renew its auto-critique & evolve it beyond the usual Circular Firing Squad bathos it can yet be again both a dominant & a dissident force. The tepid reaction to the Brexit vote in the US was ominous. The media shrugging over direct Russian trolling of the 2016 campaign was obscene.
Buck up. Nowhere in the famous poem does it at any point specify that any rough beasts slouching in the general overall direction of Bethlehem are either immortal or invincible.
Be good to yourself.
Be excellent to each other.
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