Night of the Living Dread

It’s a little after 2 am on November 9, 2016, as I begin writing this post. The outcome of the presidential election had become clear by the time I went to bed about three hours ago, my stomach in knots and my brain in shock, but the rest of me utterly exhausted.

Lynn, meanwhile, had—wisely, it now seems to me—turned in perhaps an hour earlier, when things merely looked bad but could conceivably, just maybe, still work out.

“Wouldn’t you rather go to bed without knowing for sure,” she asked, “and be able to sleep, and find out in the morning what happened?” I felt frightened and disconsolate, and anything but sleepy at that moment. I beseeched her for reassurance, as if I was a little boy and she was Mother Courage. Where, in reality, I’m four years from eligibility for most senior discounts, and Lynn is my pragmatist spouse of the same generation.

She assured me, at around 10:15 pm, that, even if Trump should win, we—meaning she and I personally, and all Americans who believe in decency, facts, science, truth, democratic institutions, and the rule of law—would Get Through This. “This” being at least four years of being led by an ignorant, infantile, bullying narcissist. We would have no alternative but to do so, Lynn  reasoned. She reassuringly added, though, that Donald  Trump’s stupidity and empty promises to Make America Great Again—whatever that meant, in code or in procedural practice—inevitably would  reveal themselves, and ultimately would turn all but his most rabid supporters against him. Her message, basically, was that, yes, a Trump presidency would suck, but that this, too, would pass.

With that, Lynn went to bed. I told her that I might not even seek updates, and might rather just read magazines for a little while to see if I could get sleepy. But of course I did check in with televised results and newspaper websites. Which is how I knew soon enough that reason would in fact not prevail this day, in a country where there are several irrational grievances and at least one firearm for every single human being.

I then turned off the television and my smartphone, and I laid down on the sofa with a crossword puzzle to divert my brain and the white noise of a fan, directed away from me, to soothe my senses. Somehow, improbably, it actually worked. I started getting drowsy. (It seems that fearing the end of civilization takes a physical toll.) So, around 11:15 I crawled into bed beside my sleeping spouse, took a lot of deep breaths to calm myself, and somehow fell asleep.

For less than an hour, that is. By that time, a phenomenon that had begun many hours before—when it first was becoming apparent that the forecast Clinton victory was at very least in serious doubt—had jolted me awake. That phenomenon was a near-constant need to pee—as if I’d gone in the span of one evening from the typical middle-aged man who must relieve himself periodically during the night to a Depends-wearing geezer whose drain train pulls into the station every few minutes.

Did I mention, by the way, that, as those early election returns and first state-by-state forecasts were coming in, I was catching up on Sunday night’s episode of The Walking Dead on our PC while Lynn was watching an old episode of The Good Wife on our iPad? I could see her through the glass door, sitting on the couch in our sunroom, blissfully ignorant of the latest manifestations of both the zombie apocalypse on the PC screen and the electoral Armageddon on the kitchen TV. I was running to consult that TV during Walking Dead broadcaster AMC’s frequent commercial breaks, while also stopping by the bathroom to let loose great streams of urine—a river out of all proportion to the amount of liquid I’d downed in the previous many hours. By the end of that Walking Dead episode, Daryl, the show’s crossbow-firing macho hero, looked to have been all but broken by the evil sadist Negan and his murderous band of sycophants. My spirit felt equally broken by the electoral trends. And my urinary tract was suggesting that I’d suddenly become a man of 80.

So it was that my brief sleep ended a little after midnight, never to reengage. That first post-bedtime trip to the loo woke me sufficiently that the electoral events of the evening, and all of their chilling implications, came flooding back over me. Try as I might to resume the deep breathing and calm my increasingly feverish brain, it was all over. My stomach again was in turmoil, only now it was doing somersaults. I was up roughly every 15 minutes to piss. (In fact, I have to do so now. It’s as if my body wants to purge itself of his horrific election-night folly, but simply can’t get to the bottom of it. There’s no relief because there’s Always More in there—just as there first will be President-elect Trump, then a President Trump, then, perhaps, a Generalissimo or Fuehrer Trump.)

When it became crystal-clear to me that there’d be no more sleep for me, I knew what I had to do. The title of this post may not be terribly clever—it’s bound to be echoed in duplicate or in spirit by scores of other shell-shocked headline writers on news sites and blogs—it accurately reflects my feelings, and it dovetails nicely with the whole Walking Dead thing. It formed in my mind before I ever rose out of bed and headed to the PC to write this post.

I know that this is far from the best-crafted or most thoughtful narrative I’ve ever written for this space. And it sure as hell isn’t the funniest, as my sense of humor seems to have escaped me. Nevertheless, I’ll cursorily proofread it—resisting the urge to sand its edges and try to make myself sound smarter—and post it before daylight. It seems important to me to do this.

Several hour ago, before the Trump win was certain, I heard on the radio that President Obama had said, somewhere, something yesterday along these lines: The important thing to remember, whatever should happen, is the beauty of democracy. Keep perspective. Whoever wins, the sun will come up in the morning and we’ll all still be Americans.

Notwithstanding the fact that it may well have been easier for our incumbent chief executive to say such a thing before it was revealed that he will be succeeded by a doofus madman, I do think that President Obama’s sentiment was sincere, and that he truly believes what he said. (Although I imagine he also now believes that morning sun would feel a lot warmer had his political party run Anybody Else against the admitted pussy-grabber.) Still, it’s really, really hard for me to share Obama’s steadfast belief in the leavening powers of democracy.

Why? Because the facts as I see them are that the fate of our nation, and to an extent of the world, will be in the hands, come January, of an ego-driven borderline (?) sociopath who David Letterman rightly described recently as “damaged.” Because Lynn and I, and millions and millions of Americans who think like we do, will be beholden to Trump's immature whims and grudges, while he’s abetted by a compliant Republican Congress and an echo chamber of zealots and right-wingers who’ve somehow become so bereft of both hope and reason that they literally would—and did—elect anybody who wasn’t the inexplicably demonized and hated Hillary Clinton.

It really feels to me as if democracy both triumphed (the system doesn’t look so rigged now, does it?) and died tonight/this morning. While I imagine the sun indeed will come up in a few hours, maybe it shouldn't.

It feels right to me to post these thoughts while it’s still dark outside, and after I’ve scanned through my 100-plus earlier blog posts to see that everything in them seems trivial compared with what’s just happened.

I would love to look back at this post someday—ideally sooner rather than later—and regard it as having been hugely hyperbolic and melodramatic. I hope it will prove to have been exactly that—as our vaunted democracy kicks in, straightjackets the power of the Idiot King, and boots him out of office— disgraced as he should be—in  2020.

But it’s hard—near impossible, in fact—for me to take the philosophical long view at this moment. When it's still pitch-black outside.

[Postscript: It's now a little after 8 am and it's overcast and raining. There is no sign of the sun.]