Election Day

(Mila with our family's ballot yesterday afternoon at our polling place at Williamstown Elementary School.)

How strange and cheesy this morning, to take out the trash and see the sun come up over Mount Greylock on a bright and mild beautiful morning and getting all choked up and misty about this "new morning" in America.

I realize the awesome historic power of the moment yesterday, but to me it felt kind of anti-climactic. After the drama and struggle of the primaries, and the long lead amid a great storm of bad news, as the opposition got nastier and nastier, the win felt more like a relief than something to celebrate. It was just too hard for too long to even consider the alternative.

A few quick thoughts:

• I've been looking at this election through the lens of the books I've been reading through it. When we first got back in June, I found at the top of one of our box of books my old copy of Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago. It is impossible not to be amazed at the symbolism that Obama's celebration was in Grant Park, the very place where the Democratic Party's long, nasty civil war began during the 1968 Convention.
• I've also been reading Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and have been reading 2008 as a pleasantly bizarro 1972. There was the long, ugly fight against the Party bosses, building a rare coalition of people who are getting screwed by the way things are, then having to face down the latest edition of the Land of Mordor spew coming from the right. But unlike in 1972, this time our candidate did everything right.
• I admit that I first started checking in with Fox News out of schadenfreude. But to my surprise, while every other outlet was ruminating on the enormity of the moment, Fox News was doing a much better job of reporting on the important House and Senate races. Also, Fox had no holograms.
• Senator McCain's concession speech was dignified and moving, and a reflection of the man he probably is rather than the shrill caricature he became in the heat of the campaign. But the mob scene he was speaking to -- booing and hooting and shouting -- was an embarrassment. This stubborn group of hateful dead-enders will make the next few years very unpleasant.
• Not everything can go right all the time, but voters in California approving a referendum banning same-sex marriage is a pretty tough worm in this apple. On this great day when we have really overcome prejudice and hate, it is disgusting that Americans would vote to willfully rob their friends, neighbors and relatives of a fundamental civil right. That fight goes on, and we'll win.