Thursday Reads: Darkness Is Rising; Time for Courage and Determination

Trump Tower AKA Mount Doom

Good Morning!!

The light is fading; the darkness is rising. We are on the precipice of a national tragedy, a global cataclysm. We must take time to mourn and then gird ourselves for political battles. Young people are our hope for the future now. We must support them and use what wisdom we have to help and guide them. This is the what the electoral map would have looked like if only voters aged 18-25 had voted.

Watertown NY WIC provides services for persons over 18 who are physically or mentally impaired and who are in a situation where they are harmed or threatened with harm by the actions of themselves or others. This often involves the frail elderly and adults who are physically or mentally disabled, seriously ill or alcohol/substance abusers.

I’m not capable of writing much today. It feels like a death in the family. I woke up this morning and for a moment everything seemed normal. And then I remember the horror that has befallen our beloved country. At least there were people out in the streets protesting in cities around the country.

On the Boston Common:

Berkeley High school students on the UC Berkeley campus:

In New York City:

Outside Trump Tower in Chicago:

And in many other places.

This morning I talked to my brother on the phone and we both cried. I’m so fearful for my nephews, but I’m determined to do anything in my power to protect and support them. Yesterday an old friend called me to see if I was OK. She was sobbing. It’s going to take some time to process what has happened and figure out how to react to it. But I refuse to give up. I will keep writing on this blog and I’ll try to find some ways to volunteer and/or donate to help others.

I’m going to post a bunch of links and let you decide which ones you want to click on. Every time I think about posting excerpts I have a huge amount of resistance because I don’t to traumatize myself or anyone else with unwanted information. Dakinikat suggested that I post this letter from Aaron Sorkin to his wife and daughter, so here it is. I haven’t even read it yet, but I trust Dak’s judgment.

Sorkin Girls,

Well the world changed late last night in a way I couldn’t protect us from. That’s a terrible feeling for a father. I won’t sugarcoat it—this is truly horrible. It’s hardly the first time my candidate didn’t win (in fact it’s the sixth time) but it is the first time that a thoroughly incompetent pig with dangerous ideas, a serious psychiatric disorder, no knowledge of the world and no curiosity to learn has.

And it wasn’t just Donald Trump who won last night—it was his supporters too. The Klan won last night. White nationalists. Sexists, racists and buffoons. Angry young white men who think rap music and Cinco de Mayo are a threat to their way of life (or are the reason for their way of life) have been given cause to celebrate. Men who have no right to call themselves that and who think that women who aspire to more than looking hot are shrill, ugly, and otherwise worthy of our scorn rather than our admiration struck a blow for misogynistic shitheads everywhere. Hate was given hope. Abject dumbness was glamorized as being “the fresh voice of an outsider” who’s going to “shake things up.” (Did anyone bother to ask how? Is he going to re-arrange the chairs in the Roosevelt Room?) For the next four years, the President of the United States, the same office held by Washington and Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, F.D.R., J.F.K. and Barack Obama, will be held by a man-boy who’ll spend his hours exacting Twitter vengeance against all who criticize him (and those numbers will be legion). We’ve embarrassed ourselves in front of our children and the world.

And the world took no time to react. The Dow futures dropped 700 points overnight. Economists are predicting a deep and prolonged recession. Our NATO allies are in a state of legitimate fear. And speaking of fear, Muslim-Americans, Mexican-Americans and African-Americans are shaking in their shoes. And we’d be right to note that many of Donald Trump’s fans are not fans of Jews. On the other hand, there is a party going on at ISIS headquarters. What wouldn’t we give to trade this small fraction of a man for Richard Nixon right now?

So what do we do?

First of all, we remember that we’re not alone. A hundred million people in America and a billion more around the world feel exactly the same way we do.

Second, we get out of bed. The Trumpsters want to see people like us (Jewish, “coastal elites,” educated, socially progressive, Hollywood…) sobbing and wailing and talking about moving to Canada. I won’t give them that and neither will you. Here’s what we’ll do…

Read the rest at Vanity Fair.

People participate in a protest against the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in New York, New York, USA, 09 November 2016. EPA/ALBA VIGARAY

Here’s one more from Garrison Keillor at the WaPo: Trump voters will not like what happens next.

So he won. The nation takes a deep breath. Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out, and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president. We are so exhausted from thinking about this election, millions of people will take up leaf-raking and garage cleaning with intense pleasure. We liberal elitists are wrecks. The Trumpers had a whale of a good time, waving their signs, jeering at the media, beating up protesters, chanting “Lock her up” — we elitists just stood and clapped. Nobody chanted “Stronger Together.” It just doesn’t chant.

The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win the thing, and that’s their problem now. They wanted only to whoop and yell, boo at the H-word, wear profane T-shirts, maybe grab a crotch or two, jump in the RV with a couple of six-packs and go out and shoot some spotted owls. It was pleasure enough for them just to know that they were driving us wild with dismay — by “us,” I mean librarians, children’s authors, yoga practitioners, Unitarians, bird-watchers, people who make their own pasta, opera-goers, the grammar police, people who keep books on their shelves, that bunch. The Trumpers exulted in knowing we were tearing our hair out. They had our number, like a bratty kid who knows exactly how to make you grit your teeth and froth at the mouth.

Alas for the Trump voters, the disasters he will bring on this country will fall more heavily on them than anyone else. The uneducated white males who elected him are the vulnerable ones, and they will not like what happens next.

To all the patronizing B.S. we’ve read about Trump expressing the white working-class’s displacement and loss of the American Dream, I say, “Feh!” — go put your head under cold water. Resentment is no excuse for bald-faced stupidity. America is still the land where the waitress’s kids can grow up to become physicists and novelists and pediatricians, but it helps a lot if the waitress and her husband encourage good habits and the ambition to use your God-given talents and the kids aren’t plugged into electronics day and night. Whooping it up for the candidate of cruelty and ignorance does less than nothing for your kids.

We liberal elitists are now completely in the clear. The government is in Republican hands. Let them deal with him. Democrats can spend four years raising heirloom tomatoes, meditating, reading Jane Austen, traveling around the country, tasting artisan beers, and let the Republicans build the wall and carry on the trade war with China and deport the undocumented and deal with opioids, and we Democrats can go for a long, brisk walk and smell the roses.

Read more at the WaPo. Revenge will not be so sweet for those of us who aren’t as wealthy as Keillor, but it will still be interesting to see the Republicans try to deal with their madman and watch the yahoos come to their rude awakening. But it’s a good piece and it gets better, so do read on at the WaPo link.

And just one more from fantasy novelist Saladin Ahmed: Fantasy and the Real World.

Let me tell you a few stories

Story #1: After years of abuse at the hands his foster family, a talented British boy escapes to private school, which holds challenges of its own.

Story #2: A small group of agents from several nations works to destroy a powerful weapon of mass destruction before it falls into the hands of the enemy.

Story #3: Terrifying creatures, neither women nor men, lurk near the privies, waiting to snatch unsuspecting children and turn them into similar creatures.

Story #4: Savages stand poised to destroy the Eagle Republic. Traitors threaten it from within. Only the Orange Man and his Great Southern Wall can protect us.

Which of these stories is fantasy? Which is a story from the real world? Which of them is “true?” Stories 1 and 2 are of course ‘real world’-toned descriptions of Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings, respectively. On the other hand, stories 3 and 4 are fantasies that millions of American voters have accepted as accurate descriptions of the real world around them. All of these fantasies have the power to shape not only our own realities, but the real lives of millions of other human beings….

Despite the best efforts of those who insist that we somehow –magically, one might say– keep politics out of the stories we tell, our fantasies are, inevitably, shaped by the world around us. And, perhaps more to the point, the world around us is shaped by stories. The stories we choose to live by, the fantasies we choose to believe in, matter.

“Why should a man be scorned,” Tolkien once wrote, “if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” Fantasy provides us a noble escape from an imprisoning world, he reminds us, and we must not “confuse the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.”

That escape, however, is always temporary. Eventually we are dragged, kicking and screaming, back to prison. What then? “The night is dark and full of terrors,” George RR Martin writes, and at its best fantasy is not only an escape from those terrors but a bulwark against them. Magic glasses that help us recognize and counter the bad fantasies at work in the world around us. The best fantasies offer us true and beautiful stories that do battle with the ugly fever dreams of the real world.

UT students block bridge in Austin, TX

More headlines in no particular order.

WaPo: Moscow had contacts with Trump team during campaign, Russian diplomat says.

Charles Blow: America Elects a Bigot.

Daily Beast: Team Trump Struggling to Fill National-Security Jobs.

Reuters: Trump due in court before Oval Office.

Here’s a weird one: Trump Win Dashes Dreams of UFO Disclosure.

Politico: President-elect Trump invites British prime minister for a visit.

NYT: World Is About to Find Out What Donald Trump Really Believes.

NYT: Trump Rides a Wave of Fury That May Damage Global Prosperity.

Linda Greenhouse: The Choice Confronting the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice.

Nieman Lab: The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse.

Buzzfeed: Secretary Of Education Ben Carson? Here’s A List Of Potential Trump Cabinet Picks.

The Education Reference Desk considers students who enrolled in UWW online degree programs that do not come to campus for those courses to be Distance Education (DE) students.

The New Yorker: Hillary’s Powerful Concession.

Market Watch: Siemens warns wave of populism threatens business.

CNN: Mexico stunned by election of Donald Trump.

The Economist: What does Donald Trump’s victory mean for the world?

Reuters: Tough reality check for Trump’s pledge of better heartland jobs, wages.

NYT: On Late Night, Comedians Grapple With Trump’s Victory.

If you want to, please share how you are doing after this incredible shock to our political and cultural systems; and post any other comments and links you want in the comment thread. Courage Sky Dancers!

Election Day Reads

Good Morning!!

The great day has arrived! I’m going to go and vote as soon as I can wake up enough to function properly. I couldn’t get to sleep last night. I watched Hillary’s rallies in Philadelphia and Raleigh and then lay awake for a couple more hours, unable to stop my mind from racing. I think my body is registering how important this day is to me, even as I try to stay calm.

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wondered why I wasn’t allowed to do all the things boys and men could do? Why couldn’t women be lawyers, doctors, priests? Why couldn’t girls even be “altar boys?”

When I was in elementary school, I sometimes fantasized about being a boy–not because I actually wanted to be male, but because then I would have the freedom to do what I wanted to do and not what I was “supposed” to do. It’s amazing to me now that I realized even then that I was considered less than in my culture.

Hillary Clinton speaking in Philadelphia last night.

When I was in high school, it was still a basic assumption in our society that “real women” didn’t want careers. The height of a girl’s dreams was supposed to be to get married, raised children, and help her husband become successful.

When I was a junior in high school, I read The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan; and suddenly I began to understand why my smart, college educated mom often seemed dissatisfied and frustrated. That book changed my life; it reinforced the inner feelings I had always had that girls and women didn’t deserve to be treated as less than boys and men.

Next month I’ll be 69 years old. I’ve waited all my life for the day when I could vote for a brilliant accomplished woman as President of the United States. That day has come and I plan to enjoy it to the fullest.

I know this won’t instantly change the culture we live in; in fact the sexism and misogyny will almost certainly get worse–just as racism got worse after we elected the first Black President. But if this is what we have to go through for girls an women to someday be treated equally, then so be it.

Tonight Hillary Clinton will be President elect. Little girls will know that they can be anything they want to be, even though they still will have to work twice as hard as their male counterparts to achieve the same level of success, and even though their achievements will still be denigrated and ignored. But we will have moved a bit closer to real change and real equality.

A few reads for you before I head to my polling place:

Claire Landsbaum at The Cut: So Many Women Put ‘I Voted’ Stickers on Susan B. Anthony’s Grave That the Cemetery Is Staying Open Late on Election Night.

On November 8, 1872, Susan B. Anthony was arrested for illegally casting a ballot in the presidential election. More than a century later, single women are the nation’s most potent political force. Anthony’s grave in Rochester, New York, is a popular destination for women who want to honor her memory by doing their civic duty, and according to the Democrat & Chronicle, this year the city’s mayor is making it even easier to do so.

Mt. Hope Cemetery, where Anthony is buried, usually closes at 5:30 p.m., but on Election Day, it’ll be open until voting ends. “Visiting Susan B. Anthony’s gravesite has become an Election Day rite of passage for many citizens,” Rochester’s mayor told the paper in a press release. “With this year’s historically significant election, it seems right to extend that opportunity until the polls close.”

Kevin Kruse at Politico: What It Took. How a lifetime of compromises and concessions brought one woman to the brink of history.

In early 1979, on a community access television program called In Focus, the wife of the new governor of Arkansas was peppered with question after question about all the ways in which she was an untraditional woman.

“The thought occurs to me that you really don’t fit the image that we have created for the governor’s wife in Arkansas,” the host, a self-described “newsman,” said to 32-year-old Hillary Rodham. “You’re not a native, you’ve been educated in liberal Eastern universities, you’re less than 40. You don’t have any children. You don’t use your husband’s name. You practice law. Does it concern you that maybe other people feel that you don’t fit the image that we have created for the governor’s wife in Arkansas?”

Audience for Hillary’s midnight rally in Raleigh, NC last night

She looked through her large, thick-lensed glasses and smiled.

“No,” she began, “because just as I said before … ”

She had made a choice. In 1974, she had moved to Arkansas to be with her boyfriend, Bill Clinton. It was a decision that would dictate so many others, big and small, for decades to come—and here, in this spartan studio, on this rinky-dink show, was one of them. How to respond to this man?

This issue of wifeliness was being put to the first female lawyer at the finest firm in Little Rock. Rodham had been 1 of just 27 women among the 200-plus students in her law school class at Yale. She was one of only three on the staff of 44 attorneys on the Watergate impeachment team. She could have responded to the interviewer by pointing out any of these things. It was the ‘70s: She could have responded with an impassioned lecture about feminism, or chauvinism, or women’s lib. But she didn’t. She responded with an equanimity that must have been a challenge to muster. “That doesn’t bother me, and I hope that doesn’t bother very many people,” she said.

You already know the story, but I hope you’ll read the rest anyway.

J.J. Holmes and his sister with President Obama

You know about this story too, but this article about the disabled 12-year-old boy who was kicked out of a Trump Rally is really inspiring: An anti-Trump disabled boy was booed at a rally. The next day, he got to meet President Obama.

Twelve-year-old JJ Holmes has been enamored with the 2016 presidential election.

By Election Day, the boy would encounter two of the most polarizing figures in this campaign season — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and President Obama — and his experiences with them would be vastly different.

For months, JJ, who has a severe case of cerebral palsy, has been sitting on his knees at his home in Longwood, Fla., using his nose to type searches on his iPad for “Mary Poppins” plays and Trump events, his mother said. Throughout the election, she said, he had been itching to go to a rally — to express his disdain for Trump, who came under fire last year for mocking a reporter with a disability.

“I wanted to go because Donald J. Trump made fun of disabled people,” JJ said in a video statement Monday to The Washington Post, using his computer vocalization device.

Please go read the whole thing. You won’t regret it.

Adele Stan at The National Memo: Pantsuit Feminism Is Real Feminism.

On November 8, if America doesn’t make history by electing its first former beauty-pageant owner and reality-show star as president, it will do so by electing the first woman to occupy the Oval Office. A woman in a suit; a suit that has pants.

Much is made of Hillary Clinton’s sartorial choice of the matching jacket and slacks as her signature look. But whether the subject of celebration or mockery, the response stems from the same fact—that a woman in public life who shucks nylons and pumps in favor of the freedom of movement long afforded men, well, that’s a woman who is claiming power.

Hillary with LeBron in Cleveland

Some might claim that the pantsuit is merely a symbol of feminism, one that can belie the motives of the woman who wears it. Symbol though it be, there is nothing “mere” about it: the pantsuit, as worn by the first presidential nominee of a major U.S. political party, is feminism itself. Its existence as an acceptable form of female dress in the halls of power is the result of thousands of years of feminism, and in Western culture, particularly the last few hundred.

The battle to unbind women from corsets and crinolines and bustles and busks was the work of feminists. It’s hardly a coincidence that the doffing of the corset in the 1920s, together with the adoption of a shorter dress that hung loosely on the frame, coincided with the time women gained the right to vote. But pants were another thing entirely. Pants were—and often still are—symbolic of something other than comfort or even ease of movement. Pants are a symbol of power and self-possession. Pants encase and protect the genitals while skirts offer access. A woman in pants is claiming her body as her own, treading her own path in the world.

Yes! When I was in high school in the 1960s, girls weren’t allowed to wear pants. We weren’t even permitted to wear culottes, which were very popular then. Today as an old retired lady, I wear jeans most of the time and the heck with anyone who disapproves of it.

The New York Time Editorial Board: The Question for James Comey.

Never mind.

That was the message James Comey, the F.B.I. director, sent to Congress on Sunday in his latest headline-grabbing interruption of the 2016 presidential race.

Having dropped a bomb packed with innuendo on Oct. 28 when he informed Congress that there was a new stash of emails that “appear to be pertinent” to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, Mr. Comey had to dig himself out.

On Sunday, he reaffirmed his original decision in July to recommend against charging Mrs. Clinton for her careless handling of emails containing classified information when she was secretary of state. The new emails — on the computer of Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Mrs. Clinton’s close aide Huma Abedin — contain nothing except personal messages and duplicates of emails that had already been reviewed, investigators found.

But you can’t unring a bell. The damage Mr. Comey’s back-and-forthing has done to the election, to his own reputation and to that of the F.B.I. is profound. Nine days of early voting passed after he made his rash announcement about the new emails, an announcement made when he and his investigators knew nothing about the content of those emails because they didn’t even have a search warrant. That was nine days during which millions of voters went to the polls under the false impression — created by Mr. Comey’s action — that there was new evidence against Mrs. Clinton, showing possible criminality.

More at the link. Too bad the political reporting of the story at the NYT was so horrendous and irresponsible.

One more read from a man who saw his abusive father in Donald Trump. Don’t miss this one: My Father Donald Trump, by Oliver Lee Bateman. I’m not going to excerpt from this essay; I hope you’ll go read it at Medium.

I’m going to head out to vote soon, but I’ll be around all day. Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread and have a fabulous election day! If this thread gets too long, I’ll post another one, and so on until the election is decided tonight.

I love you all!