(no subject)

I find myself still weeping with joy and disbelief.

I must steal graffiacane's excellent photograph from his LiveJournal (which accompanied a jocular threat to any friend who failed to vote) as a visual metaphor for my feelings this morning. A door has opened in America, and it can damn well be slammed shut again someday, but for now it is open. And the fresh air and sunshine feels better than I ever would have expected ... it is a terribly, terribly hackneyed metaphor but it really does feel, emotionally, as though we have spent eight years in a cramped, ill-lit, cough-inducing room (sort of like where I live—only covering an entire country. I should make clear, given the photo's source, that I am not casting aspersions on graffiacane's digs, which look rather orderly and cheerful).

There have been ample studies of how people not only express but experience the most intense moments of their lives through the most appallingly clichéd metaphors; probably for the same reason our brains (at least in America) tend to fasten so often on the songs we would rather not find ourselves repeating to ourselves for hours on end.

So as a professional, I'm embarrassed by this post, and I should be, but I cannot but revert to the enthusiasm of youth at the simple prospect of a symbolic presidency again, one that so embodies a twenty-first-century reality and allows for the hopes and visions of so many people to be projected upon it. For the office to be occupied by someone who pre-punctures the illusions while maintaining the hopes is almost too much to be hoped for.

And the campaign so incorporated and embodied all of the psychological principles I have been intermittently exploring in the joculum blog...the further things went, the more impressed I became as the missteps diminished and the e-mailed appeals from campaign headquarters played upon our emotions in ways that acknowledged our intelligence rather than insulting it. (Of course the campaign was manipulative; that is what a campaign is. But it was all done so intelligently and with such awareness that every successive appeal for time and money bolstered my hope that this man would be capable of running a crisis-ridden country. Or of gathering the advisors who have some idea of how to do it.)

I shall probably post my own election night experience as a comment on juggzy's blog or ron drummond's rather than here.

(no subject)

Just in time, the youngest member of the Art Papers staff directed us all to the Onion's (satirical, for the non-cognoscenti) election coverage, which puts things in the perspective they require, except for the gratuitously cruel ones, which are also useful for putting things in perspective.