Down To The Wire

I think the main reason why I stayed up to watch the results come in last night was the desire to avoid that same horrible shock on waking up to see the headlines that I experienced earlier this year. I didn't want to repeat that. It was awful. I thought it would be easier to deal with a dawning realisation spread over a few hours. I had a horrible gut feeling that it was going to go the wrong way. The similarities to our own Brexit vote were just too uncannily close. It felt to me like the US election was following the same disturbing narrative arc.

I'm glad I did stay up. There is no denying that this is a major historical event. And the electoral college maths is nothing if not enthralling to witness playing out, even when the numbers are trending in the opposite direction to the one you want. Although the distortions of that system gave Trump a clear victory margin, the popular vote is incredibly close, currently only 0.2 percentage points in favour of Clinton, the equivalent of a just a single large town's worth of people across the entire country! That's down to the wire in by book!

I don't feel qualified to comment on all the hows and whys, but it seems clear that both the UK and the US have fallen prey to a new post-truth political culture where the winning strategy has focussed on emotions rather than real issues and policy. Information is served up as fact without any accountability. It no longer seems to matter that almost every statement uttered is a lie. The message duplicated and propagated via social media, repetition eventually serves to substantiate. People ultimately believe what they want to believe, regardless of the truth, which is becoming ever harder to uncover. 

To add to the weirdness of the morning it snowed here overnight. Come first light there were a couple of inches worth of the white stuff. There was no traffic on my hill, so the eerie quiet added even further to the sense of unreality. It's certainly been a day I won't forget. I couldn't deal with the real world so I decided to lose myself in the snow for much of the day. I think that helped!