And Then November

How young and dumb I was in June.

I snapped this photo from my hotel room at the New Orleans Marriott at around 6 A.M. You can’t tell if the clouds are coming or going, but I can tell you: they were going. This foreboding apocalyptic hell-scape was rolling on past and I happened to snap it at the perfect time, with the sun just peeking on out from underneath the oppressive (and strangely, deeply blue) cloud-bank. I hunted for a good quote to accompany it, and was gutted by the absolutely perfect line from Dave Eggers’ novel about Hurricane Katrina, Zeitoun:

Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light.

Great, right? Not only did it fit the image perfectly, and not only was it literally about the city captured in the photograph, but this was June of 2016. Trump had, inexplicably, survived the primary and was the presumptive Republican nominee for President of the United States of America, but nobody – nobody – expected him to win. We had seen an incredibly ugly past year of politicking. The dark clouds of racism, sexism, transphobia, and xenophobia – battles long fought and often lost but ever so slowly marching toward light – had rolled back over our sunshine, but we thought this was merely a hiccup on the way forward.

And then November happened.

Well, of course, and then so many other things happened first, culminating in Comey’s absurd and probably election-defining letter to Congress. And Donald J. Trump, con-artist playboy misogynist imbecile, was elected to the highest office in the land and the most powerful position in the world.

And now my picture looks pretty damn naive. Or worse, like it’s celebrating exactly the opposite of what it is. As if I might be suggesting that the previous eight years of a dignified, intelligent, diplomatic executive were actually an oppression, and the orange glow of populism was finally cracking through the bleak to save us.

That is certainly not the case.

So anyway. Here’s to the next four years, or however long this craven unqualified pop-tart dismantles the country with his pendulum-swing between incompetence and unbelievable malevolence.

This is a dark time, but soon there will be something like light, again.