Comments | ellen_kushner: The End of an Error

ellen_kushner

The End of an Error

Jan 20, 2009 23:58

When GWBush won his second term, I wore black for a week - not in NYC, where this sort of thing is de rigeur, but in Cambridge, Mass., where earth tones predominate. And over the past 4 years I have often had the awful feeling that I was living in a ghastly alternate reality, where everything had gone wrong in the world, and particularly in my ( Read more... )

politics

Comments 19

swimtech January 21 2009, 12:19:30 UTC

You've only been feeling that way for four years? I've been feeling that way for eight. I mean, that Supreme Court decision that gave Bush the presidency was clearly the key junction that tipped us into Bizarroworld. I've been trying to get back to my own universe ever since. I think that finally, the multiverse has made some kind of vast cosmic correction.

I watched everything on a widescreen at work. It was wonderful.

ellen_kushner January 21 2009, 15:51:51 UTC

Well, yeah, 8, of course - but any electorate can make a mistake the first time - it was the second election that broke my heart - esp. coming so soon after 9/11, which altered reality all by itself. It all started to feel like a bad SF novel.

Though I don't disagree about the Court the first time. Yeah, I guess so.

swimtech January 21 2009, 16:22:39 UTC

Honestly, that whole period of indecision and then the Court ruling felt so bizarre, I really did get that wrenching feeling very early on, and it only got stronger after everything began to go so terribly wrong.

rikibeth January 21 2009, 13:34:14 UTC

I'd been saying all day how awesome "tanks into tractors" was. Lowery quoted Scripture in a way that made me HAPPY, unlike Warren who made me cringe.

jess_ka January 21 2009, 15:21:13 UTC

just a general feeling of wrong, wrong, wrong. This wasn't the way it was supposed to be.

Very much the way I felt; and I couldn't quite believe we were actually going to have an articulate, compassionate person in the presidency until yesterday.

dryfoo January 22 2009, 17:01:54 UTC

Thank you! Nicely said. The railroad metaphors I want are too much overused to express it: that we had gotten derailed, jumped the tracks, or at least gotten switched onto a bad siding somewhere; but that now we're back on a track we'd left a very long time ago. This feels like the right country again, that we're going in a good direction ( ... )