Election night, I left Steve Kornacki for a French Netflix series — unfortunately, about an election. Fortunately, the underpinnings were so corrupt, so overloaded with weird electoral methodology, I couldn’t draw comparisons to us and develop an associate depression.
I went to bed without checking the election results. After a (sleepless) while, I understood that election nights are still fraught with remnants of 2016.
However, the lasting effects of the trauma do not seem to interfere with my intelligence. I spent way too much time yesterday on Twitter, reading hysteria couched in catastrophic terminology, which did not influence me at all. (Thank the Great Lady for Rachel Maddow.)
Blame is being flung all over the map. A lot of it isn’t rational. The only group I can blame is what is euphemistically called “low-information voters.” Who knows why dumb voters fill in the ballot for utterly unqualified rich men? Who knows why dumb voters leap to lies, to insufficiency of substance?
I don’t. I’m not dumb. If it’s hard for dumb people to grasp simple realities of science, it’s harder for intelligent people to grasp why dumb people do what they do. And given the stated, uh, policies? campaign promises? of the dork who will be the governor of Virginia, I doubt the Virginia educational system will be dedicating itself to teaching real stuff to its students and, through some sort of osmosis, the students’ parents.
Maybe Virginia will return to the 1950’s when, in response to Brown v Topeka, they canceled public schools and allowed white parents to establish “private” white “academies.” Black kids and their parents had to fend for themselves.
As someone wrote today on Twitter, let us not forget that Virginia is the South of Robert E. Lee and provided the Confederacy with its capitol.
But let us not also forget that the South lost the Civil War.