Salon.com Life | Waking up with the election blues

If there is such a thing as collective depression, then the circumstances of the election are just right to encourage it. At least the scandal in Florida four years ago gave people something to focus on; there was a battle to be raged. This time, despite some lingering uncertainty over the final result in Ohio, there isn’t the consolation of injustice, of having someone to blame. Depression is not a very focused thing and Wednesday’s mood was universal only in that it allowed people to group their individual reasons for cheerlessness around the huge disappointment of the election result.

Some of these reasons are seasonal: The clocks have been turned back, the leaves are coming down, the bloody Christmas stock has appeared in the shops…

Exactly. Tuesday’s results are only made worse by the fact that it’s almost dark when I leave work now.

Ken Layne posts a hysterical map and writes the following:

Rove’s re-election strategy was elegantly simple: Scare the bejesus out of Jesusland. Faggots are headed your way! Satanic Muslims are hiding everywhere! That’s all it took to get Jesusland to do the job. Intellectual conservatives like the National Review staff are flattering themselves if they honestly believe Jesusland cares about conservative thought. The “reality-based” folks are learning that Jesusland doesn’t even care about jobs or the economy. In Jesusland, it’s all the will of Jesus. No job? No money? Daughter got her clit pierced? Jesus is just fucking with you again, testing your faith. Got the cancer? Oh well. Soon you’ll be with Jesus. Reality is no match for a mystical world in which an all-powerful god is constantly toying with every detail of your mundane life, just to see what you’ll do about it. Keep praying and always keep your eye out for homosexuals and terrorists, and you will eventually be rewarded … all you have to do is die, and then it’s SuperJesusLand, where you will be a ghost floating in a magic cloud with all the other ghosts from Jesusland, with Jesus Himself presiding over an Eternal Church Service.

More…

So many thoughts and emotions have been going through my head since yesterday. I hope to process it all in the next few days, and my blog will help me do that.

Matt and I were both depressed last night. We decided to have dinner in the food court at the mall at the South Street Seaport. I picked a table for us by a window overlooking the East River. The food court was desolate. Across the water, I could see the headlights of cars rushing up the BQE underneath the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. I had a sudden urge to go there — to leave the food court and run with Matt across the water to brownstone Brooklyn: beautiful, liberal, brownstone Brooklyn. Have a relaxing dinner in Park Slope or Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens in a fun restaurant among the Jews and the multi-ethnic and lesbian couples with kids. I wanted to be around people who were feeling the same things I was.

I feel like a stranger in America today. Not because I’m a northeasterner or a liberal, but because I’m gay. I feel scared now. I really do. I don’t know if those who voted to ban gay marriage on Tuesday understand this. I don’t think they understand the message this sends to us: you’re not wanted, and we wish you didn’t exist. Certainly there are some who do understand and don’t care. But I think there are lots of people out there who, for whatever reason, feel it’s necessary to ban gay marriage but just can’t appreciate how it feels to be a gay person and hear such a message. To us, it’s not about protecting values; it’s about saying to us, we don’t like you, and we want to you to get out of our country, and you are a perversion, and we want to throw you in prison, and if you should happen to die, that wouldn’t be too bad either.

Perhaps it’s because I’m a Jew that I’m attuned to such things. Perhaps not. But I’ve been thinking about Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which I’ve been wanting to read. It could happen here — perhaps not on the same scale as Nazi Germany (unfortunately, comparisons to the Nazis are too cliche today), but that still leaves a whole lot of room. I think of Orcinus and his recent writings about an emerging American-style fascism, which I’ve been meaning to read. Fascism is insidious, because it’s usually couched in an appeal to the values of one’s own nation. It doesn’t have to involve goose-stepping.

Basically, I feel scared and unsettled.

More later.