Just back from London.  Been thinking.  A few exhausted notes:

Glad to see spirited discussion actually increasing in the wake of the last 24 hours.  This is a good sign.

In ’72, Nixon was re-elected in a genuine landslide.   In less than two years, he was gone and disgraced.  There are differences here, surely — most prominently a GOP Congress and an amoral media — but still… hubris almost always destroys the sinner.  It’s just a question of when and how.

Yes, the people who voted for Bush are woefully misinformed, and some of them are genuinely fanatic, in the purest religious sense.  But most of them are pretty regular folks, not crazy, thinking with human emotions we all share with the best intentions in the world.  The nutjobs will never be in the majority.  If we start treating them all as a nutjob bloc (something I’ve done myself, sorry to say), we lose the discussion.  Some of the commenters are right: we have to find ways to talk to the rest of America, and not just each other.

One of the in-flight movies was Broadcast News, James L. Brooks’ comedy which revels in the once-creeping shallowness of TV news.  It’s now a shockingly dated period piece, set in a time which felt like the height of corruption and which now I can only long for in comparison.

Another was The Bourne Supremacy, sequel to The Bourne Identity.  What a quintessential Bush-era series of movies.  An Aryan assassin, cleansed of all sin, literally raised from baptismal waters with his past now scrubbed and forgiven — Bourne Again, if you will (and if Ludlum chose the name accidentally, he has a hell of a preconscious mind) — is thus morally enabled to unleash any level of violence he personally deems fitting in a personal pursuit of justice.  Holy shit.  If that’s not a Bush action hero, I don’t know what is.  Brilliant movies, very well made, great popcorn stuff I really enjoyed.  But on a deeper level… well, precisely what you’d expect from American film these days.

Which brings me to my final point.  The election of Bush is a very, very bad choice.  It is a major setback for humanity, for a long list of reasons each of us either fully understand already or will very soon.  (More on this in the next few days.  But for starters, America just announced to the entire planet that we’re OK with Abu Ghraib, we’re OK with Guantanamo, and we’re OK with illegal wars.  This was an important announcement.)

But electing Kerry would have been only the first step in a very long journey, one which still stands before us, either way.  It’s a little longer now.  That’s bad.  But that’s all.

Even if Kerry had won, America’s body politic would still be gravely ill with its all-for-sale, winner-take-all culture, which dispatches the good of the people — the very purpose of democracy — as irrelevant.

And this illness is merely a symptom of a broader American cancer, the broader cultural narrative in which We Are Good and They Are Bad, one which shears away the very ability even to conceive of grey areas, comprehension of which are essential to resolving even the mildest cultural or societal questions in a democratic way.  We Are Good and They Are Bad shows up in our sports (staged victory-conflicts, where we revile the opposing team), in our films (which almost always resolve in single-conflict, hero-crushes-evildoer sequences), in our religions (um… Satan?), and damn near any other thing we do.  It rationalizes the most horrific behavior.  It is the killer of thought and growth.  And it is hard-wired into our culture in more ways than I can list.

Arriving finally at the We Are Good and They Are Bad presidency can hardly be a surprise.  Even if Kerry had been elected, we’d still have much bigger problems to address.  So…

We are where we are.

Let’s get started.