The rabbit hole

So America has a president. This is our first elections in the U.S. and it was quite a heady experience to get caught up in the the whirlwind of it all. We stayed up much of last night following the results and it was excruciating... Shuffling between watching TV, looking at different news web-sites and refreshing the pages all the time waiting for states to turn blue- I felt almost half-American. I think the thing about being in America during this period is that it brought home a very simple truth to me. Regardless of how the election has turned out, Americans have a choice, and they know, with some amount of certainty that their vote will count and that they do have a say in who leads them. Jude & I could conceivably go through our lives never having voted once (I think my parents have only ever voted once...) and even if we did, everyone knows who gets which slice of the pie right from the start, and that having an election would merely be an elaborate song-and-dance routine for some semblance of legitimacy.

I don't particularly think Bush has a great mandate actually. Sure he's got the majority or the electoral and popular vote, but he's the incumbent; if America has truly spoken, as he claims she has in his victory speech this afternoon, he should have won more convincingly. America did speak, through their votes; and what their votes say is that this is now a profoundly divided country. If Bush only considers the 51% of the population who voted for him as America, then what is the other 49%? By fighting such a divisive campaign, rallying the "who's in" against the "who's not", Bush (and one suspects Kerry would have had too) has effectively alienated half the people he now has to lead for the next 4 years. And that, as they say in Texas, "ain't gonna be easy, mister. He's fortunate that Kerry was gracious in defeat. I suspect if the reverse had been true, Bush would have sent his lawyers straight to the Supreme Court at the expense of this country's need to get on with its life.

I think everyone in Ann Arbor was a little moody today. Class seemed a little more subdued than usual, professors were a little restrained, even the weather's colder and drearier today than it's been for a while. As for Jude & I, I won't say we're depressed, but yes, a vague sinking feeling in the pit of your gut. Just kind of blue all day I guess (pun fully intended). I know it may not affect me in a deep personal way, but I know how much a change in leadership means to my friends here, and to America's future as a whole. This country cannot be led by a man who believes that issues of personal faith can and should inform governmental policy. One may admire him for his religious conviction, but as Kerry said in one of the debates, you cannot legislate something based on an article of faith. Not in a country which prides itself to be a melting-pot at home and a global leader abroad.

Listening to NPR all day was good. There was a whole ton of great shows that featured guest commentators, writers, columnists from all over the country and it was engaging because people were very sensible and rational in their analysis of the results- none of that exploitative muckraking or accusatory arguments that tend to follow election controversies. Many of them were disappointed, and it was actually moving to hear them speak, to be in a country where people feel so strongly about politics that you could almost hear the grief in their voices. A woman from Tennessee called in and confessed how petrified she now is for the next 4 years, that she doesn't know if she wants to remain in a country whose president opposes therapeutic stem-cell research on the one hand, but is at the same time willing to heedlessly sacrifice thousands of American lives to fight a baseless war.

Despite what many people think, I don't believe Bush is stupid; perhaps simple, or of average intelligence. But what is distressing is that he masks stubborness and obstinancy behind a rhetoric of conviction. That he responds to and governs from his gut first before his brain. That's fine if you're the owner of a baseball club and needed to only make decision about which player to recruit; but if you're the leader of the only superpower left in the world with an entire artillery of nuclear weapons at your disposal, that is very very dangerous indeed.

On a lighter note, Jude once half-jokingly said that we'll have to move to Canada if Bush wins, and now that he has, that half-joke doesn't seem so funny anymore. We both interviewed at Mcgill University in Montreal 2 years ago and we would have gone in a flash if not for Jude's green card needing us to be here. It's my absolute favorite North American city and the prospect of spending Christmas there this year makes me very happy. And Jude said something really quite funny last night considering the circumstances: looking at the distribution of the electoral votes, it seems that the only sane places to be in America right now are states which either 1) have access to the ocean (e.g. California, New York) or 2) have fresh seafood (e.g. Boston, Washington) or 3) border Canada (e.g. Michigan, Wisconsin). And of course, there's always Hawaii...

"You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." - Morpheus, "The Matrix"