The End

You need to see it for yourself.  Because just reading the news stories about Trump’s statement at around 7pm ET on Thursday will lend it a degree of coherence and sanity, and it was anything but coherent and sane.  It was the desperate ramblings of a supreme narcissist who, seeing his world beginning to crumble, would rather destroy everything than submit to a reality which doesn’t fit his narrative. We’ve moved beyond electoral politics into grotesque theater.

In around 15 minutes, the President of the United States managed to claim that the country’s election process -- the process on which his authority rests -- is corrupt. That the counting of legally cast votes should be stopped (except in Arizona, where there’s still a chance that he could chip away at Biden’s current lead).  That the polls predicting a big Biden win constituted voter suppression (evidently this was no problem in 2016).  That votes for his opponent are illegal.  That this was all perpetrated by “big media, big money, and big tech.”  That bursting pipes and nonexistent “secret counting rooms” have been engineered by a corrupt Democrat machine to steal the election.  This is gaslighting taken to its more extreme and most dangerous.

Meanwhile, one by one, Trump’s enablers turn their backs on him.  Fox News, whose coverage of this election has been commendably fair and critical, stuck by their decision to call Arizona for Biden, despite Jared Kushner’s frantic phone calls to Rupert Murdoch. Twitter, long the vehicle for Trump’s most specious and inflammatory rhetoric, began flagging his posts as false and misleading.  GOP leadership, realizing that Trump has outlived his usefulness now that certain congressional districts have been retained, refuses to parrot his conspiracy theories.  His inner circle has dwindled to a smattering of sycophants and immediate family members.  

It almost makes you feel sorry for the guy.  Almost.

This election could still go either way.  As I write this, Trump leads in Georgia by less than 500 votes.  Biden’s lead in Nevada is less than 9,000.  I honestly have no idea what will happen over the next two months.  Yet I am given some confidence and hope by the people, Republicans and Democrats, who are actually administering the election process.  Public servants in department store clothing who are discharging their duty, capably and seriously.  People like Joe Gloria in Nevada,  Gabriel Sterling in Georgia, Jocelyn Benson in Michigan, Kathy Boockvar in Pennsylvania.  These are the people who give me some hope that my home country might be able to pull through this in one piece.  May God keep them safe.

Breaking

(all times CET)

6:00am: I slept longer than I thought I would.  An early glance at my phone: Trump carried Florida and Ohio easily, and a scroll down the list of the battleground states reads Trump Trump Trump, some by sizeable margins.

6:30am: Robert Reich tweets to stay calm and “drink water.”

6:45am: Doing rough math on my phone calculator as CNN goes county-by-county through PA.  It looks to me like Biden can close the gap there.

7:00am: Trump misspells “polls” as “Poles” in a tweet.

7:15am: Rick Santorum is on CNN already talking about signatures on mail-in ballots in PA.  I think we can see where this is headed.

7:30am: The doorbell rings and it’s the pest control guy who comes to our building every few months to pour pesticide from an enormous jug down the kitchen drain.  L and I call him “Monsieur Cafard” (“Mister Cockroach”), which we find very funny for some reason.  He is polite and friendly, and before he leaves he tells me not to use the kitchen sink for the next 2 hours.

7:48am: Trump still up by 700K votes in PA, with 69% of the vote counted.

7:57am: So far this is all the horror of 2016 with all the slow-drip torture of 2000. 

8:14am: Trump’s lead in GA is down to around 100K votes as he steps to the podium in a room packed with people who are not wearing masks.  Standing before a phalanx of American flags, Trump riffs about all the states that he has won and the victory party he was planning, then pivots to the “sad group of people” who are evidently "stealing the election."  “This is a major fraud on our nation.  We want all voting to stop.  We will be going to the Supreme Court.”  Mike Pence concludes, kind of sheepishly, “We will make America great again again.”

8:39am: CNN reacts with predictable moral outrage at Trump’s statement.

9:00am: I get back in bed for a while.  My (German) wife asks me how it’s possible to declare a winner when the votes haven’t been counted.

9:30am: It’s okay to use the kitchen sink now.

10:30am: I have a Zoom call with our General Manager in Italy.  We talk about business and COVID19.  He doesn’t bring up the election, and I don’t either, and it's reassuring to know that there are people in the world with other things on their minds.

11:00am: Biden now leads Wisconsin by around 10,000 votes.

11:23am: My employer’s stock price is up 3.6%.

12:30pm: Online service for the Church of Scotland Geneva, for which I play Zoom technical director.  Today’s scripture lesson is from Matthew 18, the parable of the unmerciful servant.  The king forgives a big debt from one of his servants, who then turns around and roughs up a few of his fellow servants who owe him money.  The king catches wind of this and has the servant hauled off to prison to be tortured until he pays up.  The metaphor being that God is the king and we are the servant, and we should “pay forward” God’s mercy and forgiveness to others, even (especially) those who are indebted to us.  Or else.

1:36pm: Trump’s lead in Michigan has closed to fewer than 30,000 votes.  There remain around 200,000 uncounted votes in in Wayne County, where Biden currently leads by 36 points.

2:15pm: I do work Zooms as primary blue and red polygons flash on CNN on the other laptop. 

2:22pm: The gap is PA is down to ~600K votes, which might be a smaller than it was, but I’m having trouble keeping track at this point.  My employer’s stock price is up 4.6%

2:41pm: My home state of New Jersey has voted for legalizing recreational marijuana use.

3:12pm: Biden now leads in Michigan by ~8,000 votes.  Tweet of the day so far: “No matter what happens today, the United States of America is the country that made Donald Trump its President, and it always will be.” (@Vinncent)

3:44pm: I have a spring in my step as I go to my doctor to get the flu vaccine.

4:46pm: I put a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator, in the hopes of opening it tonight around 11pm during my Zoom call with my college friends, thereby guaranteeing a Biden loss.

4:51pm: On CNN, PA is being characterized as being “very much in play.”  Trump’s lead in PA is now ~540K votes.  My employer’s stock price is up 6.27%.

5:16pm: Biden leads in Wisconsin by around 21,000 votes, and in Michigan by 32,000.

6:12pm: My employer’s stock finishes trading up 6.21% for the day.

6:37pm: The Election Commissioner for Wisconsin, a woman named Meagan who looks around 28, with straight blond shoulder-length hair and a northern midwestern twang, is on CNN explaining how they officially tally votes.  Election officials from several states have been doing this over the past hours, and I find it inspiring and comforting.  

8:00- 10:00pm: We spend a couple of hours sitting on the couch watching CNN on my laptop.  Watching American TV is a novel activity for me, and generally I think the cable news stations on both sides of the spectrum are toxic and harmful on many levels, but I can’t resist watching today.  After following John King for several hours, I’m pretty confident that I could operate the interface on the “Road to 270” screen.  CNN announces that Biden will speak “soon,” and I spend the next hour or so mentally drafting the speech I want him to give: celebrate the voting process, calmly call for remaining votes to be counted, project confidence in the outcome but do not claim victory.  At around 10, Biden walks onto a stage in Delaware and gives more or less that speech, and I am buoyed by the probably illusive feeling that civility may still be possible in my home country.

11:02pm: I Zoom with several of my friends from college who are in DC, Boston, California, NYC, Zurich, Tokyo.  I leave the champagne in the fridge and crack open a beer instead.

J-0

Seeking peace-of-mind on a day like today is like trying to meditate with a car alarm going off in your living room.  And knowing that the car may explode at any moment.

The words of Richard Rohr, OFM, are always good, but especially today:

“We project our anxiety elsewhere and misdiagnose the real problem (the real evil), forever exchanging it for smaller and seemingly more manageable problems.  The over-defended ego always sees, hates, and attacks in other people its own faults – the parts of ourselves we struggle to acknowledge.  Most of us do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.”

Election Eve

 

Over the weekend, groups of Trump supporters stopped traffic on several bridges and roadways in the NYC area – the Whitestone, the GSP – parking their pickup trucks and SUVs across all lanes of traffic and waving flags and whooping while the traffic stacked up behind them.  I wonder what motivates a person to do that.  I plumb the depths of my empathy stores, and I cannot see a shred of equivalence between these people and a BLM protestor, much less your run-of-the-mill Biden/Harris canvasser.  This is no more than trolling in real life: annoying and inconveniencing people for the sake of, what exactly?  To convince someone to vote for Trump?  I suppose one could stretch the rationale to its thinnest and argue that this could show the “silent” Trump supporter that they’re not alone.  But let's be honest: this gesture is not about making a case for a candidate, it’s about people giving the finger to anyone who doesn’t want what they want.  It also sends a not-so-subtle message to anyone who might be looking: we are prepared to break the law, to put people in danger, to create problems for you and anyone else who might be behind us, in order to show our loyalty to the Great Leader. 

Seeking succor, I consulted the Economist election poll aggregator, which currently gives Biden a 19-in-20 chance of winning.  Of course we’ve been here before, with Nate Silver in 2016, etc.  My college friends and I are planning on Zooming Wednesday night, and I have made mental plans to chill a bottle of champagne to open during the call if (and only if) it’s called for Biden beforehand.  I try not to think about this too much.

In any case, you could argue that we’ve survived the past four years, so, if the unthinkable were to occur, we can survive another four, right?  Unless of course you’re one of the 231,182 people who didn’t.

November

I don’t hear so much about NaNoWriMo these days, if that’s even what it’s still called.  National November Writing Month.  I’m not sure if that’s because its popularity has waned, or if that’s a function of the social media circles I travel in (or not) these days.  In any case it came to mind a couple of weeks ago, and I toyed with the idea of trying to write something every day in November.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Last year I took a stab at this, and inspired by Flannery O'Connor, tried writing a prayer every day.  I didn't get very far before concluding that I was not a good writer of prayers, but I reread them recently and a few were actually okay.  Hope.

I set the alarm for 7:45 this morning, fed the cats, and drove to Gy (pronounced “zhee,” with a soft “g”), which sits at the edge of the Geneva canton on this side of the lake, around 10km ENE as the crow flies.  For some reason, I’ve done most of my running to the SSW of here, so this was relatively new territory.  I was unsure of how far out to go, as I needed to be back in time for online church at 11.  Originally, I was planning on parking in Meinier, a couple of villages closer to town.  But then I drove through Meinier and kept going to Gy, pulled by a similar desire that I suppose captures mountain climbers.  One wants to keep going.

I parked on the main street in one of those 15h disc parking spaces, close to a bus stop, which I would need later to go pick up the car.  I quickly oriented myself with my phone, then traversed the traffic circle and took the first left onto a chemin that was about wide enough for a tractor.  I was considering tracking the route on Map My Run, but I quickly decided against it once I heard the synthetic voice start talking to me.  I had my GPS watch for the distance, and anyway the whole point of runs like this is to not know exactly where you are and where you’re going.  

Sometimes, there’s a significant delta between what one thinks the terrain will look like from the map and what it’s actually like when you’re trying to navigate it.  What looks on the computer like a nice path along the river can turn out to be a parking lot next to the wastewater treatment center.  Happily, today was not one of those times, as a mile or so after departing Gy, I managed to pick up the Seymaz River, which trickles from the border with France all the way down to the Arve, and which I was hoping to follow back home.  Evidently there was some big restoration project around 10 years ago, and the trails along the entire way are well-tended.  Near Corsinge they have laid down a narrow boardwalk to span a marshy area.

Around halfway home I encountered the Prison de Champ-Dollon, which sits right along the path near Puplinge.  The contrast between the gentle stream and fall colors on the one hand, and concrete, barbed wire, and grated windows on the other, made my heart ache.  The walls of the prison have reliefed arches, which reminded me of the Reformers’ Wall in town, except these walls have prisoners behind them.

Sit Down Be Ehrfürchtig

Two identical buildings sit on opposite sides of Briennerstrasse, along the eastern edge of Königsplatz.  Grey stone, three stories high, no domes or other architectural flourishes.  Walking by, you wouldn’t notice anything special about them, and neither did we when we were in Munich a few weeks ago.  It wasn’t until our guide pointed them out that we noticed their understated neoclassical impressiveness.  Tall, round-arched windows set inside rectangular reliefs which formed their own frame and obviated the need for a lintel.  Squared-off doric columns supporting twin porticos that extended toward the street, shielding the entrances from the elements and offering a platform from which orations could be given.

The building to the north, our guide explained, was the Führerbau, built by the Nazis in the mid-30s.  It’s where Hitler and Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement in 1938 (“peace in our time,” etc.), and it was the party’s HQ until the end of the war.  With this added context, the building took on an awesome / fearsome aura, which I suppose was the point when it was built, even though there’s nothing sinister per se about the architecture.  The only overt political symbols – two immense eagles, cast in bronze, which originally hovered over each portico just below the roof – have been removed; only the holes from the giant screws that held them in place remain, like the bullet holes one still sees pocking other sites in Munich.  Today these two buildings are home to the University of Music and Performing Arts and the University Art Library.  Some of the original fixtures are still inside, our guide noted, and indeed I spied a couple of cool art deco light fixtures through one of the windows. 

In 1945, I imagine it must have been extremely tempting simply to tear these buildings down, given what they represented and what went on inside them.  The Allies did in fact raze a nearby memorial commemorating the Nazis who had been killed in the Beer Hall Putsch. But rather than demolish the Führerbau, the Germans planted a row of trees across the street, to neuter the buildings’ dominance over Königsplatz, and rededicated them to art and music – a graceful middle finger to the National Socialists, who had gone to great lengths to persecute and shame so-called “degenerate artists.”

We continued walking toward the Alte Pinakotek, which had been partially demolished by American bombs near the end of the war.  The jigsaw of newer and older brick revealed how the museum was rebuilt, intentionally allowing the scars to remain visible. 

Inside the museum, like everywhere else in Munich, people wore masks.  Disposable white medical masks, plain fabric ones, hospital-grade ones, sequined fashion-y ones, homemade t-shirt reboots.  One man improvised with a cone paper coffee filter.  This did not prevent life from going on: people rode the metro, they went out to bars and restaurants, they stayed in hotels.  At most of the places we went, you scanned a QR code that sent you to a contract tracing form.  Once you got seated at your table, you could remove your mask, but if you got up to leave or to go to the bathroom, you put it back on.  In the dozen or so restaurants we visited over a week, every single person did this.  On the odd occasion when someone would absentmindedly forget, a waiter would dash over to remind them, and they would quickly and apologetically put their mask on.

Right here is where I was planning to draw a nifty compare-and-contrast between Germany and my home country.  How the fatality rate from COVID-19 in the US is six times what it is in Germany.  How one country is run by someone with a PhD in quantum chemistry, and the other by a landlord who muses about drinking Clorox. How I haven’t seen any reports from Germany of politicians suing each other over mask regulations, or of dudes with assault rifles storming government buildings over public health measures.  How Germany’s response to the pandemic has demonstrated above all a sense of humility: a respect for mysterious, often destructive forces which are more powerful than our own will, wishes, or pride.  Humility which has obvious roots in the country’s own past demons, and which has inspired gestures like Willy Brandt’s kneeling before the Warsaw ghetto in 1970.  Humility which has allowed artful acknowledgements of the darker elements of the country’s history, rather than the frantic, often hypocritical attempts to efface them that one sees elsewhere.

The problem is that this comparison doesn’t completely hold up.  In fact, there are dudes in Germany storming government buildings, minus the assault rifles, but plus the far right banners and sentiments.  The anti-mask protests are not confined to the Boogaloo crowd; they’ve sprouted up in London, and Zurich, and Geneva.  Even in Germany, where atonement for the sins of the Nazis has been deeply socialized into the post-war generations, around half of the population did not approve of the Warsaw Genuflection.  And to be fair, there are plenty of places in the US where officials are trying to do the right thing: my daughters’ school district in Massachusetts, for one, is being thorough and responsible with their plans for the fall (certainly moreso than the public schools here). 

Still, the numbers are what they are.   As of September 16^th, 9,371 people had died from COVID-19 in Germany, or 11 per 100,000 inhabitants.  In the United States, those figures were 196,676 and 60.  There is selfishness and denial everywhere, and to some extent, in all of us.  But where we live, and how we live, and the people we elect to run things, still mean something.

Fifty thanks

 

Sesame oil, George Saunders, Transport Publique Genevois, hot showers after running in the cold, Südtirol, Siberian cats, New York City, John 1:1-14, swallows, all the people, The Low End Theory, Thomas Merton, mangoes, albuterol, In Our Time, Hancock County, forgiveness, naps, root beer, so many people, Abbey Road, the standard normal distribution curve, Medjool dates, autumn, DFW, Bains de Paquis, Exile in Guyville, Arsenal Football Club, Sunday afternoon rain, all the people, running, being, Running and Being, the ‘96 Yankees, maps, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, Pink Floyd, Joey Baron, Harvard Book Store, so many people, Vines, the Jersey Shore, purple yam bao, the first 15 minutes of Once I Was an Eagle, remembering, forgetting, today, tomorrow, all the people, so many people