Disconcerting States #6
Friday, November 8, 2024. Noontime.
By John Dean
In the house where I’m staying and the average Americans I’m staying with, we have had a wide-screen television on about twenty-hours a day before and throughout the day after the election itself, the sixth of November.
The TV was on all the time. Sometimes with loud or soft sound, sometimes without. You got used to a wall of live, vivid, brighter and sharper than life, nonstop breaking news about the US Presidential Election and regional Congressional and Senatorial contests. You grew accustomed to the groups of male and female broadcasters, commentators, news hounds, chart analysts all over that great Cyclops on the wall as you had your morning toast, ate your evening dinner, or chatted about the family dog.
Media here is your environment as natural as trees and sky, wind and rain. You live in a media state.
In these living conditions you stare at this spit-polished tribe of US experts at their jobs with furrowed brows, glassy eyes, tense body behavior, compelling voices — always at a speed that struck me as twice as fast as the English one hears spoken outside the USA. They announced near-miracles, hopes lost and found, disasters, curve balls and revelations. All brought to you LIVE! From CNN, ABC, TNT, CBS, PBS or Prime Video.
Once Trump’s election was certain, it was news panelists time on TV. In our living room we saw displayed the large curving desks of the representatives from the Democratic and Republican parties on lightning bright stages, mixed in with a few network journalists. Rows of people argued why they won or why they should have won. Some crowed to high heaven about the achievement of Mr. Trump and Company, about his overwhelming Electoral College vote so much higher than 2020, and how the brain dead media got their neck-and-neck predictions and poll numbers all wrong.
While the losers, the Democrats, scrambled hard with their “Yes, but…” and “You could see it that way, however…” and “What you forget…”. But there was absolutely no disguising their loss. They were dancing on wobbling bridges made up of decrepid party-line vines over an abyss of loss. And I kept wondering about one of the headlines I read yesterday: We Can’t Keep Relying on the Democratic Party. Yup. “Yes We Kam” did not work.
Time moves on. Then something strange happened in our American house. I felt something oddly unsettling and calming at the same time in the kitchen and living room during the day. But couldn’t figure out at first what it was.
I went into the food prep area this morning across from the panoramic TV wall and saw some guy digging up shards of lost civilizations in the Egyptian dessert with his dusty crew of careful workers scrubbing away small shards of dull-colored rock on the National Geographic TV channel. The station tag-lined: “Further” and „Illuminate and Protect the Wonder of Our World”. The announcer’s voice was friendly and reassuring as hot chocolate or a charming Norman Rockwell painting. Visual valium.
Plus the quiet. Discussions about the election’s results in the house were nil. No one asked, “Where’s the news? What’s the TV saying?” In a way, it was a relief. The frenetic part of the election itself was over.
So here we are, folks, in the calm — deceptive? — of the aftermath.
But even if we watch National Geographic or old James Bond movies and play with the family dog, a new reality is out there. Ronald Reagan used to say about his election that it’d be “morning in America”. What time of day is it here now?
One thing is sure: everyone is waiting in America to see what happens from on high from the new-old leader Mr. Trump who’s won the peak of Mount Sinai.
Isn’t an extreme change coming about? The US government faces the possibility of profound constitutional restructuring. As the American political consultant James Carville, the “Ragin’ Cajun’, said about the fundamental issue at play in this election: “It’s about the Constitution, stupid!”
This is America. Strikes me, there is always more change here than in old Europe. Sometimes where you’d least expect it. But that doesn’t mean you get used to it or the change comes easy.
I picked up my local community newspaper this morning in its dusty wrapper at the end of our suburban driveway amid piles of autumn leaves. The paper went on about the election from its front page headlines on through to page three.
The fundamental message from the “New Press…founded 1991…Free” about the election’s conclusion was common sense. Today is what it is. Live with it. Get on with your life. Mingled with cold turkey.
Local sympathy was clearly for the Democrats. Even though Harris carried all the west coast and northeast. Even though Virginia went blue and we can now call the Old Dominion part of the Northeast (with Maine about seven hundred miles [1126.54 klicks] away as the car drives). Even so, most US voters chose Donald Trump as America’s President this week. Like it or lump it.
The Reverend Burt Salmon, a local Episcopal rector from a downtown church here in northern Virginia, issued a statement in the New Press. He tried to soothe his parishioners troubled souls in the wake of this election’s results. The Reverend Salmon wrote: “As news of our nations elections become more real, many of us are grieving, some are rejoicing, and a significant number of those within our parish are genuinely afraid.”
Rector Salmon stressed that he and his colleagues are here to help. In this troubling time they are “as close as a phone call, a text, an email or a visit and we invite you to be in touch with us as you need to.”
We believe, the Rector emphasized, in a better world. “We are citizens, friends, not of this temporal and temporary world, but of the kingdom of God.” And there, he concluded, “there is only justice and equity, and we will work, proclaiming release to the captive and freedom to the oppressed.”
But does that change the results of this election? Or what is portending now in these here disunited states?
