[ed. The media must be going crazy. I don't know anybody who has or wants to read anything more about this election, especially opinions about it going forward. As Thomas Pynchon once wrote (so I've heard), “What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove’s difference and the universe can be on into a whole ‘nother song.” Let's just leave it with this: Milestones (N+1):]
***
"The shape of the night was so similar, the outcome so similarly foreordained in retrospect. I wonder if the past eight years have been so disillusioning, so hardening, that the intensity of that earlier shock is simply no longer available.This is the emotional-political paradox I’ve been thinking about today: on one hand, the feeling of soberness and cold clarity. On the other, the reality that in every respect, what happened last night is far worse than what happened in 2016. This time it isn’t an aberration. Trump is now the ultimate Republican insider. The Republicans control the Senate and almost certainly the House, and nowhere has the US’s still-unfolding right-wing coup paid more dividends than on the Supreme Court. The people in Trump’s orbit are meaningfully more sadistic than the people who were there last time—and those who have stuck around are more empowered."
