Swapping ‘great’ for something better

Diary of the last four days

All Saturday

Still watching the returns, still seeing a gap toothed map of America, grey holes where Nevada and Arizona and Georgia and North Carolina and Pennsylvania are waiting to turn blue or red.

Refresh, refresh, refresh; a thousand more counted and 40 minutes later another thousand and it's like wading in molasses and you could just ignore it, it's not like there won't be plenty of commotion when it's revealed, but you don't, you just keep refreshing.

Sunday 4.30am 

Awake and looking at a gap toothed screen once more. What’s the fixation? It’s wanting an end to all this shit, and contemplating four more years of it. Four more years of democracy fraying. Thugs in ICE uniform edging towards lawlessness. MAGA-capped people in T-shirts that read “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Needs some assembly.” Unmarked vans grabbing Black Lives Matter protesters off the street. Wondering where four more years could take people who do that. .

5.30am

Refresh, refresh, refresh and there! In a moment, it all changes. Projecting it, calling it, filling the screen with the graphics they have had standing by for five days, Here’s the President you picked America and congratulations you picked the one that's not the monster.

Thank christ for that. Also, Refresh, refresh, refresh as you keep checking on the numbers just to make sure they know what they're doing, because don't you dare let me down.

But after a little while you stop checking and just soak it in as the coverage becomes more and more exultant. Here is the sound outside my window, people post all over Twitter, putting their phones into the sunny morning, here is the sound of my city.

And then here look at these people dancing in my street and there is dancing with joy and delight and it makes you beam and the image is already fading from your mind of that creep in the red cap, on the stage at the end of his rallies, fitfully jerking like some grotesquely bloated rusted marionette to YMCA and Macho Man.

A media person says every single person they've interviewed on the campaign trail, on either side, has told them they were exhausted. 

So much jubilation, so much dancing, so much smiling. People want much more of this sort of thing, I reckon. 

Next slide please: here is some pop cultural analysis I have conducted while making a cup of coffee. I wish to explain the great enthusiasm everyone is showing for the most excellent Netflix show Queen's Gambit. It's about a girl who grows up to do very cool things with a chess board. Hope that’s vague enough, people are still upset with me for letting it slip that Danaerys turned murderously bad in the final episode of Game of Thrones. Anyway, in Queen's Gambit our hero comes through, an underdog turning the tables, goodness prevails. And how often do you get that in a story these days? We need it. We’re thirsty for it.

Maybe now that Trump's gone they could reshoot the Game of Thrones ending and have the character doing something at least vaguely consistent with the rest of her imaginary existence up to that point. Dare to dream.

Sunday 11.00am 

While I’m enjoying it all and breathing out I’m also reading Trump tweets and like everyone else in the world saying, what?

First he announces: Lawyers News Conference Four Seasons, Philadelphia, 11 a.m 

Then he deletes it and the new tweet says no it’s at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, and you think, wait what, and before you know it all of Twitter is belly laughing and playing the Curb Your Enthusiasm music as we watch the loyal foot soldiers of the leader of the free world stage a press conference in the carpark of a gardening store next to Fantasy Island Adult Books and Novelties and across the street from the Delaware Valley Cremation Center.

Cue a million tweets along the lines of this one saying:

I could write jokes for 800 years and I'd never think of something funnier 

Someone else writes:

The moral arc of the universe is long but bends toward Four Seasons Total Landscaping between the sex shop and the crematorium.

This wholly supports my thesis that I think I’ve mentioned here before. The human condition is: hungry, scared, horny.

And that’s Trump all over, same as he’s ever been. Hungry, scared, horny 

Scared? For sure. Thugs and bullies generally are. Right now he’s scared of jail, scared of bankruptcy, petrified of being seen as a loser, and tweeting almost completely in caps.

There's a persuasive argument that the reason not all that much got done was that he was scared of failing. Nazi creeps like Stephen Miller never had his hesitation, though, and parents have been separated from their children forever. There are a quarter of a million people whose lives might have been saved if this guy had done what should have been done. 

Sunday 2.00pm 

Watching the speeches, and feeling better, line by line. The president-elect is great but Kamala Harris is better yet, using the words of John Lewis to say that democracy is only as strong as your willingness to fight for it, to guard it and never take it for granted.

She says you chose hope, unity, decency, science, and, yes, truth.

Crazy that those things need affirmation, cheering to see that it happened. 

But above all she’s telling the little girls watching that while I may be the first woman in this office, I won’t be the last, 

and

see yourself in a way that others might not see you, simply because they’ve never seen it before. And we will applaud you every step of the way.

You can wait for days for votes to be counted, you can wait lifetimes to be given your due rights, and acknowledged. This is a good day.

Last Friday was a good day too. Reader Pete Hodgson emailed to say:

Unless I am missing something, the media have missed the bit about our Parliament having the highest percentage of women globally - even before specials came in. 58 of 120.

Jenée Tibshraeny said on Twitter

Can we stop calling NZ’s new cabinet “diverse” when it’s actually representative. There’s nothing “diverse” about being a woman or having ancestors that come from a place that isn’t England.

Sorry, men in red caps, the real world is doing better - Being Best, even - and swapping your idea of great for something better.

Monday 7.20am

Simon Marks is on the line from Washington talking about the guy who makes his face orange to command respect, and what he might do next.

His aim is plain enough: allege crookedness on a grand scale, convince people the election was stolen.

Will his army of followers go wild in the streets? The streets so far are reported to have little wildness in them.

On social media there are plenty of people gargling this Kool Aid, but what social media shows you can represent real life in more or less the same way reality TV can show you how a business genius looks and behaves. Not very well at all. 

How many are fully swallowing this shit? How great is his army? The correct answer is not 70 million.

Someone wrote that before the election they watched a Trump rally on Long Island, and realised there were more banner-filled trucks, guns and loudspeakers than people. They said:

Trump supporters made a lot of noise, but Biden/Harris voters got the job done.

The illusion of all those boat flotillas, and cars and trucks conveys a sense of size but like the public transport campaigns like to show us, all that space taken vehicles doesn't add up to all that many people.

1.00pm

Hello normal daily life! Hello normal Dr Ashley, talking about defence force people and protecting ourselves from the virus and who has scanned and who has not, and man, it’s hardly asking a lot is it, to use your app?

Do we want our luck to go on holding?

Dr Jin Russell, who really knows her stuff spells it out 

Jin Russell @DrJinRussell

With our 7th case of community transmission at the border since the August Auckland cluster and noting I am consistently the only person masking on the bus or scanning in, I’ve taken the unprecedented step (for Jin!) of emailing Chris Hipkins. c.hipkins@ministers.govt.nz /1

Allow me to summarise. She says we need to up our game if we don't want to be sitting ducks for another community outbreak. She has written to the minister asking if we could please make the following happen: 

• mandatory QR scanning/sign in when any items are purchased

• mandatory QR scanning/sign in for high risk environments - church, large gatherings, bars, and clubs

• mandatory masking for public transport and planes

I add my vote to this and want it counted. We’re doing great, but we could be better.