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My Hillary landslide dream was so convincing that I woke up super confident of the result, not even feeling the need to check my phone. So it was even more of a sickening shock when I checked my phone to see that Trump was ahead and about to be officially declared the winner. Surely this was the dream and the dream was the reality. But I didn’t seem able to wake up. In my sleep I had crossed over to the dark time line. Given that a version of me must be living in the less dark timeline maybe it doesn’t matter. It will be more entertaining in this one surely - as long as you think dying in World War Three is entertaining.
My first thought was how furious my sleeping wife was going to be when she woke up, but she actually took the news, whilst not with delight, with queasy resignation. It was me that turned out to be the buffeted and angry one. Well maybe less angry than profoundly sad. This is yet another self-defeating blow for democracy and the one which will surely have the most impact. There will be a lot of people celebrating (and wrenching their hair out at) this result who will not be around to see the next election (if there is one) as a direct result of the vote.
I can’t remember a year where I have lost so many days to shell-shocked sorrow. And I sat mesmerised (in a negative sense) by the news coverage and the response on social media. I took the wrong day off. Or leastways I was not going to get any work done today. Perhaps it would have been a disaster either way and maybe the world is on a non-stop collision course with itself, but I suppose I should be thankful that I have managed to live for half a century in a relatively peaceful part of the world. Those fuckers born in the West in the mid-40s are the luckiest of all, of course. Having lived their whole life getting their own way, without anything going horrible wrong for them and now pretty much being responsible for voting the younger generation into economic turmoil and possibly worse.
Trump winning is not as funny as it might once have seemed and whilst I am curious to observe all that will follow, I sort of wish I didn’t have to be around to take part in the events. Perhaps a reactionary amateur at the helm, this might finally galvanise the young and the more liberal people into action and lead somewhere better in the long run. But only if we can get through the next 5 years. Trump is no match for either terrorists or a clever and venal politician like Putin and I read a few convincing articles about the international disasters that are likely to occur if Trump ends up with any genuine say in anything.
You’ll have also read more informed people than me projecting about what all this might mean (though few of them managed to see it coming, so what do they know), but all I can say is strap in. I think things are going to get pretty bumpy. And our pampered, reality TV civilisation is about to experience some pretty harsh reality. And we won’t be able to vote anyone off for quite a while.
I managed to cheer myself up with half a bottle of wine and a big salted caramel martini (so much for believing that I wasn’t really going to get back into drinking) and watching the Secret Life of 4 Year Olds, which is funny and heart-breaking in equal measure and then the first episode of Dave Gorman’s new series of Modern Life if Good-ish. It’s a brilliantly written and dense hour of comedy and it’s clear how much work Dave has put into this series. Satire is dead, because real life is now crazier than anything we could make up, but also comedians (and campaigning celebrities) have no effect on anything (beyond perhaps convincing some people to vote the other way). So comedy’s job now must be to just make us forget about the world and laugh our fears away. And Dave Gorman is a great person to do that. Though it might be the huge salted caramel martini. So if you watch it make sure you have one of those just in case.
The RHLSTP with Will Smith (in which he predicts a heavy Trump defeat, the idiot) is now up in the usual places.
