bubbles within bubbles

We still don’t know who will win the electoral college, although as I write this it looks — incredibly, horribly — as if the odds now favor Donald J. Trump. What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in the end, vote for a candidate so manifestly unqualified for high office, so temperamentally unsound, so scary yet ludicrous.We thought that the nation, while far from having transcended racial prejudice and misogyny, had become vastly more open and tolerant over time.

We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law.

It turns out that we were wrong.

There turn out to be a huge number of people — white people, living mainly in rural areas — who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about. For them, it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy. And there were many other people who might not share those anti-democratic values, but who nonetheless were willing to vote for anyone bearing the Republican label.I don’t know how we go forward from here. Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly possible. I guess we have to pick ourselves up and try to find a way forward, but this has been a night of terrible revelations, and I don’t think it’s self-indulgent to feel quite a lot of despair.

So wrote Paul Krugman earlier tonight.

And here is Kiese Laymon, a week ago:

I wonder if people who don't live in these Trump states know how hard these folks go for this man. I've been down here in Oxford Mississippi all year but this weekend I felt something different in a lot of these white folks. They're bouncing, sanctified almost, wearing all their Trump shit, eager as fuck to vote, eager as fuck to win, maniacally eager to see us lose. It's not just poor white folk. Down here, it's white folk of varied incomes, educations, all that. Many of them want something back that they've never really lost.

I've never seen anything like it other than how some of us acted in 2008. But that was different. There's a zeal in these folks to punish black folk, "nasty" women, trans folk, queer folk, Muslims, Mexicans. Even though Obama loved them to death (and our destruction), they are full of an energy I've never ever seen or felt before. These folks don't have the numbers to win nationally but the numbers they have are so hype, and our folks are so not hype to vote this time around.

I am a dumb man, but I think Trump is going to win this shit. And that is worse, in the long run, for us than Trump losing. But this energy they have is going to explode if he loses. Win or lose, these folks are going to be cutting up late November 8th. Cutting. The. Fuck. Up. Violently.

And water is wet.

We live in a nation with a huge appetite for our suffering. The nation's functionality insists on our suffering. But this ... this ain't the same shit, y'all. It's really not. If you're in the middle of one of these places, you know what I'm talking about. I know you know. Let's please take care of us. Let's hold on to each other down here, and over there, and wherever we find ourselves November 8th, no matter what, because something more acutely painful than we're accustomed to isn't simply coming; it is here. I swear it's here.