The rain has stopped. It’s
cooler now, the aroma of wet earth rising and mingling with the cigarette
stench and the smell of fish off the barbeque, long since eaten, digested;
we’re on to bourbon now, beer chasers, rolling new smokes and lighting them
with the stubbs of the old.
A clutch of moths hatched
somewhere in the garden earlier today and so the lights out the back are
being bombarded. Tiny flying insects chasing their sun. Bumping and buzzing with
a ferocious intent, getting stuck in your eyelashes, your ears.
Aside from their buzz though,
the croak of the odd frog, the cicadas, it’s quiet. Claire’s gone to bed and
I’ve shut down the endless Twitter staccato; the rolling analysis from the New York Times; the ABC; Fox News; all
the rest. Shut down the apps on my phone, closed all the windows on my laptop.
A couple of hours ago, Donald
J. Trump was named the forty-fifth president of the United States, a notion
which, only a few hours before that, was regarded as a long shot, a laugh, a
joke, and a bad one at that.
Earlier, we’d sat and
followed the results as the storm front came over, lessening the humidity, the
grey sky lowering as its moist loins girded and eventually birthed upon the dry
and crackling north coast a torrent. We watched as Electoral College votes
stacked up, and even though this was happening half a world away, we kept
watching, swapping stories we’d heard via various news sources throughout the
day.
I was on deadline, not an
urgent one, but closing in, three days with the majority of reportage behind
me, three days in which to ruminate and write. I let it lie though, gave away
half a day, pulled down the rabbit hole by the events unfolding with alarming
rapidity across the Pacific.
I, like everyone else, have
spent the better part of a year smirking at memes, nodding with faux-educated
agreement at analysis, talking with friends and work mates about how this
imposter dares set foot upon the hallowed turf that is a presidential race, and
yet here we are now. An angry white male, about to take up a post in The Oval Office,
in The White House.
Indeed, it’s never been
whiter.
At some stage, not long
before the heavens opened, we talked with my sister on Skype and the three of
us asked each other over and over how this could be happening. My phone, open
to some graphic or other, sat on the table next to my laptop and
mid-conversation, I’d lean to the right to check results. My sister, two
thousand kilometres to the south, would periodically do the same.
Claire’s sister rang at some
point. They talked briefly out the back. Incredulity was the tone that floated
back in through the open screen door.
As we shut it down, maybe an
hour ago, the analysis was starting to filter through. What next? What does
this mean? Where to from here? I don’t know and don’t pretend to. All I know is this
has ceased to be a sick joke and is now a sicker reality. It’s the uncertainty
that’s the killer, the feeling that anything at all could happen, and that most
(if not all) of it won’t be of the notion that respect, inclusion and diversity
is the key to a new world order.
The uncertainty, that’s the
killer.
The rain has started again.
The moths and frogs and cicadas have gone. There’s another storm brewing.
