After November 5th, Can't We Go Back to Normal?

From Craig Mod's issue #096 of his Roden newsletter, titled Voting For Train Man:

Four years ago, at this very hour, I was walking the Tōkaidō. I had a dumb notion: I wasn’t going to read the news (election or otherwise, which is common on my big walks; media blackouts for the entirety of them) or listen to podcasts or whatever (the goal: be “radically present” / no “teleporting” allowed). I also told my friends: Don’t text me who wins. The plan: I’d be somewhere in the middle of rice fields when a farmer would yell up the results upon seeing my unmistakably American mug. Hey idiot! he’d yell, So-and-so won! How about that! Or some beautiful old sudden-crony behind her kissa counter, while pulling a slice of toast from a forty-year-old toaster oven, would whisper, Ya hear? Joe clinched it, kid.

But you know what? In the hinterlands of Japan, you know who told me about the results of the last American election? Nobody. That’s who. No TV ambiently discussed the results. No farmer yelled them to me. No café owner said jack about Joe or Dingdong. No hotel staff muttered a word. No forty-seventh-generation proprieter so much as farted in the direction of America. Whatever had happened across the ocean, it had stayed there, at least from an information perspective. Finally, unable to stand it, I texted a friend — nearly two weeks after November fifth — What the hell happened? (It turns out that both a lot had happened and nothing had happened, that things were uncertain, frozen almost, and that uncertainty would persist for an infinite amount of time, an uncertainty that even today lingers — lingers harder than ever — in all the pervasive stupidity we bear witness to daily; stupidity on a celestial scale of stupid raised to double stupid in a race condition to the stupidest of stupid deaths.)

I joked on... well, whatever social you want these days, that "I can’t wait until next week at this time when we’ll never have to hear about US Elections again." and while I know that's impossible, what Craig describes sounds amazing. Being able to actually unplug from the 24x7 political machine that we've somehow decided is normal now, would be amazing for all our collective mental health.

You might think that being in a different country north of the USA would keep us more unaware of all things Democrat vs Republican. But it's like we've got a group chat going with relatives down south and there's no way to mute or delete the chat. It just keeps coming over the virtual wall all day long.

I've been naively thinking that if Trump loses, everything can chill out a bit. We could go back to going a week or two between hearing a politician say something stupid or harmful to democracy. But reading stuff like That “Little Secret” Between Trump and Johnson? Here’s What It Could Mean (via Kottke.org) has reminded me that even if it's a completely fair and transparent election loss, Trump and his crew will not go quietly into the sunset and make way for the next generation of Republican leaders the way it normally would happen if a political leader has lost twice in a row.

Back to Craig's article:

When the macro feels hellish, burdensome, unwinnable, I go micro. Where am I typing these words? I’m sitting in a tiny café on the edge of a small city, surrounded by a lifetime of train love. Abject, unstoppable, fully-committed train and model train love. A little man behind the counter — an eighty-something year old guy who has no desire to chat with me, who can barely hear (probably why he doesn’t want to chat), and yet gets up each morning and opens his café (not for the cash at this point, as it doesn’t seem to be making any) — is running his perfect model trains around their magical track, a track that circumscribes the whole shop like locomotive hug, with beautiful handmade scenery and hand-painted backdrops.

Maybe I need to go dig out my model train set I used to have as a kid?