A Week In Foreign Lands.

I'm better now. But it was a rough few days.

WEDNESDAY
It took me nearly a full day to identify what I was feeling.

It wasn't anger. It wasn't fear. It was sheer astonishment. I got stuck in a state of disbelief, of not fully accepting the data, of saying at some level, "This can't be."

Once I identified that astonishment, I asked myself why I was astonished. And my answer lay in the confidence which I had developed that Hillary Clinton would simply win - a confidence largely engendered by a single newspaper column that I had read months ago.

Sorry, I don't remember the author (I gotta get better at recording stuff like this), but it was an op-ed piece written by a woman, which essentially said, "There's no way that the women of America will let this misogynistic clown become president."

That column made so much sense to me that I relaxed. I still wrote a little about Trump, and I still voted on Tuesday. But mostly, I took it for granted that women acting in their own interests, and simply asserting their own dignity, would save the day for America.

In retrospect, I see that I held on to that assumption only by not paying attention to what was in front of my face: namely, that every photo, every video that I saw of Trump rallies included lots of women.

The biggest wake-up call that I did not take seriously enough was a photo that appeared in my Facebook newsfeed not long after the Access Hollywood video came to light. It was tweeted by The Guardian's Ben Jacobs:

I found that photo the saddest and most disturbing thing that I saw during the entire campaign. But I did not let it undermine my assumption. I treated it as an anomaly, and did not let myself ask, "How many women might actually vote for this man?"

****************
THURSDAY
I find out that in fact, a lot of women voted for this man; more specifically, a lot of white women.

Mind you, Black women rejected Trump soundly: 94% of them voted for Clinton, according to CNN's exit polls.

But 53% of white women voted for Trump: a large enough number that they, all by themselves, could take credit for his win.

Realizing that triggers an intense desire to understand. I find myself wanting to speak with some of those white women. Or rather, to listen to them. I still want that. I want some white women to tell me in their own words why they not only did not vote for another white woman, but why they voted for a man who speaks about and treats women the way this man does.

In the midst of all this, I have a thought that I have never had before in my life.

"I want comfort food."

I'm not kidding. I wanted food that would make me feel better. I wanted to self-medicate with a big plate of spaghetti, covered with thick meat sauce, and with some nice big slices of garlic bread on the side.

In the absence of comfort food, I let myself experience the sadness evoked by the certainty that we're going to see a lot of suffering in America over the next few years; that America has laid herself down in a bed of thorns.

***************
FRIDAY
I think about specific groups of people for whom things might go badly - especially gay people. I think about how the Supreme Court's pass on same-sex marriage may have made many of them feel that they could fully be for the first time in their lives. And about how now a reconfigured Supreme Court could change that.

Sadness.

Hey, you know who voted for Trump in an even larger percentage than white women? White evangelical Christians. How about 81 percent?

EIGHTY-ONE PERCENT.

God don't like ugly. My fear for America is outstripped by my dread for the church: this is going to be very bad. My best hope for the church of Jesus Christ is that the next few years will drive the final nail into the coffin for cultural Christianity - the idea that to be American is to be Christian. America's Christians just elected a known adulterer, a known liar, a dishonest businessman - who doesn't believe in asking God's forgiveness - to the highest office in the land.

John Pavlovitz says it better than I can. READ THIS.

Friday night, I get together with some Christian brothers for dinner. I share that I have never had such deep and extended emotional responses to an election outcome, and say I want therapy.

I have spaghetti with meat sauce, and garlic bread.

****************
SATURDAY
It was a rough few days. But I'm better now. How are you?

POSTSCRIPT: The transition. Holy crap. Racism? Nepotism? A president-elect who needs tutoring?

Can we return to Earth now?

Election 2016: Making History, Making A Deal

Right now, America is making history. We are either electing as President our first woman, or our first psychopath.

If, as I expect, Clinton wins, will Bill Clinton become the First Gentleman? FGOTUS doesn't flow the way FLOTUS. First Man? Hm. No better, if you ask me. Given his vibe, I could see a bunch of folks deciding to call him First Dude.

Guess I'll wait to see what AP comes up with. Anyway...

I just voted.

For Jill Stein.

In California.

Sorta.

This is what happened. I learned about something called "vote swapping." In vote swapping, a person in a swing state like me, who would prefer to vote for a 3rd-party candidate, but who does not want to help elect Trump, can make a deal with someone in a non-swing state, like California, to swap votes: I'll vote for Hillary Clinton here, if you'll vote for Jill Stein in the Golden State.

This sort of individualized political brokering across state lines and time zones might have been impractical, if not downright inconceivable, just a few elections ago.

Now, there's an app for that. A couple, actually.

The one that I used is called Never Trump. This video, from its website, breaks down how it works:

As it happens, when I downloaded the app onto my phone, I wound up chatting with a fellow named Ben, in...California. And we made the very deal described above - that I would vote HRC and he would vote Stein.

So I did, and I presume that he did. Which brings up the possible flaw in this whole scenario - namely, that it works on the honor system. Neither Ben nor I can know for certain that the other man voted as he said he would.

Still, I like very much the idea of edging the Republic one step closer to becoming a multi-party democracy. And I flat-out love the idea of individual deal-making. Makes me feel like a rebel, or insurgent, or something...like I should be strapped and wear a beret.

Vote-swapping has caught the attention of the BBC, ABC, and NBC, but I am eager to see if any post-election analysis will give it credit for any measure of Clinton's victory (my presumption). After all, as Clinton loyalists have incessantly reminded us during this campaign, the 2000 presidential outcome in Florida (and thus, ultimately, for the nation) was decided by just 537 votes.

I am even more eager to see what pundits have to say about the role that vote-swapping could play in further elections.  We'll see.

Clinton and Trump: Does Anyone Else Deserve To Be Heard?

So, here we are.

The Democratic and Republican parties have both endured primary election cycles that have left many of their members disaffected, from supporters of Bernie Sanders who feel betrayed by his endorsement of Hillary Clinton to Republicans who refuse to endorse Donald Trump (including primary opponent Ted Cruz, who told party members at the Republican National Convention to "vote your conscience."). Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center reports that in 2014, 32 percent of Americans identified as Democrat, 23 percent as Republican - and 39 percent as "Independent."

Now that the primaries, conventions and nominations are done, the distress within both parties seems to be forcing mainstream media to pay at least a little more attention to third-party candidates. But most Americans will remain unaware of those candidates unless they appear in the presidential debates.

Unfortunately, the very structure of presidential debates has excluded third-party candidates from them for more than 20 years - the last candidate to join the Democratic and Republican nominees in a debate was Ross Perot, in 1992. The agency doing the excluding is the Commission on Presidential Debates, a nonprofit formed by the Democratic and Republican parties.

In June, 2015, the two most well-known third parties, Green and Libertarian, joined to sue the Federal Election Commission, contending that the FEC had failed by not compelling the CPD to open up the debates: "...a debate staging organization cannot use a criterion that only the Democratic and Republican candidates can realistically satisfy. But that is precisely what the CPD has done."

In September, they joined forces again to sue the Commission on Presidential Debates (along with the Republican and Democratic National Committees) in an attempt to get their candidates into the debates.

A favorable resolution of either case could result in Libertarian Gary Johnson and/or Green Dr. Jill Stein appearing onstage alongside Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  .

Meanwhile, here are three blog posts that I wrote in October 2012, about how third-party exclusion, which I consider one of the biggest defects in our current system, came to be, and the results that it produces. I hope you find them helpful.

An October glimpse of an American spring? (October 6, 2012)
An October glimpse of an American spring? - Part II (October 16, 2012)
An October glimpse of an American spring? - Postscript (October 25, 2012)