The Void

I sit in my room, and try to read. But the light fixture keeps attracting my attention. It’s an ancient work of stained glass, beautiful in its decay, stained by a long dead artisan, stained also by time. It looks like a glass bowl, an antique you might hold fruit in, mostly for show. There are no bulbs in it, but last I checked, it worked. But the light, coming up from below, was just distracting. I only use the lamp which stands in the corner now.

The lighting fixture is a reminder of an old life. Why was it left there? Sitting in the middle of the ceiling, a hazard on those late night bathroom runs, something to be navigated in the dark as I stumble towards relief. I wish it wasn’t there, but I only rent this place. Once reminded, though, my eye starts to wander, finding the subtle ridge of molding that follows the edge of the ceiling around the room. The surface is covered in scuffmarks and stains, it wasn’t meant to be lived on. I glance up to the hardwood floor looming above. The wood slats are weathered, tempered and scratched, faded in places and stained darker in others, the memory of that old life recorded over my head – the feet of former tenants living in this same space but oriented differently. They may as well have existed in another dimension for all the sense they make to me now.

I put my book down and stand, crossing to the windows. I crouch slightly to peer up at the ground, the ceiling of concrete hovering overhead. Buildings, houses, dead trees and shrubs all dangle precariously into nothingness. Some of the buildings across the way have been abandoned, parts of them already broken free, lost to the void below. Of course, they weren’t meant to hang like that and many of the older ones started coming apart right away, only beams and a foundation, some remnant of drywall, still hanging on.

I look back at the ancient fixture.

This building should probably have been one of the first to go, somehow it’s still standing. I mean, hanging. The rents are cheep, that’s why I’m here. But there’s only so long the extra steel supports and anchors can hold us here, I know it. I resolve to move out when I save enough money, but it’s a promise I’ve made myself before and I’m still here.

I look down now, the direction few people willingly ponder, unless they are feeling fatalistic, like a man on his deathbed who is drawn to the light.

Nothingness. There is nothing below us, not even a sky, so to speak. It’s impossible to conceive distance. Depth has no meaning, it may as well be a black blanket stretched out beneath us. To ponder its true scope is to temp insanity. It’s summer, June to be exact, and that means the sun is far below and to the left. It doesn’t move across the sky like it used to. It crawls slowly, almost imperceptibly from horizon to horizon, rising in March and setting in August. Only then do the stars come out. For six months they are hidden from view while the unfiltered brilliance of the sun is visible. And yet, even during this endless day, looking out one’s window gives the impression of nighttime, all the time, the void below black and limitless, no clouds, no color, no weather.

It’s impossible to gaze at the void for long without feeling like you might go mad. You almost want to climb outside and fall into it. It seems to want you, as if your speck of a frame could fill its unlimited loneliness. Too many have given themselves to it and these days you actually see ads on TV for companies who’ll paint your windows for you, replace the horrible void with a lively meadow scene, right side up, blue sky and clouds, maybe a family picnicking near a tree, laughing at you and your gravity sickness. Public service spots advise heavy blinds on every window, closed all the time.

I can feel the building creaking around me.

Luckily, that kind of surrender isn’t as easy as it used to be. By now, most every way one could even reach the outside has been sealed off, glued shut, walled away. Our building is encased in some sort of space-age polymer, like a giant sheet of cling-wrap. It makes the outside appear vaguely hazy, like the kind of close up an actress could expect in old movies.

Our air is safely contained.

The windows have long since been bolted shut.

You don’t leave the building from the original front door. A stairwell takes you straight up through the foundation, to the transit tunnels above the city. I prefer to take the newer tunnels, the ones built after. They look normal, the way they’re furnished and decorated, letting you believe that right side up is where it should be once again. The older tunnels – the former subway lines – only provide further reminder of what used to be. The tracks still cling to the floor overhead, the station platforms appear periodically, once thronged with upside-down commuters or tourists waiting for the next train. Just behind the turnstiles, the exits are completely filled with concrete.

The nearest supermarket is a fifteen-minute walk from my building, down the old N line. Make the first right down what must have been a service tunnel and turn left at the brightly lit Atlantic Corridor. The walls of the Corridor are painted in primary colors, boldly outlined figures, over-grown children dancing, doing summersaults, holding hands. They represent the full range of appropriate ethnic diversity.

An eight-foot tall Asian kid with skin tone the color of a yellow squash is doing a handstand and every time I pass him I can’t help think that the depiction is inappropriate. An upside down boy, the artist should be ashamed.

The lights in the new corridors are achingly bright after the grimy gloom of the old transit tunnels. For a few minutes, everything is soft-focus, washed out and dreamlike.

Last year, the roof of the supermarket suddenly buckled and tore away from the building, taking with it thousands of dollars of merchandise, several dozen shoppers and six red-smocked employees. A couple of weeks later it reopened in what had been the establishment’s basement. As much as they tried to give the new space a cheerful retail environment, it looks a lot shabbier than it used to, the pockmarked concrete walls painted in a flat off white, the lighting giving everything a sickly yellow tinge.

I know that for many people, the supermarket is their favorite place. These are the most people you’ll ever see in one location. Down every isle it’s like a family reunion, people who’ve possibly never met before, excitedly conversing, paying the sloppily stacked canned carrots little heed. They’re just thrilled to be around their neighbors, to know that something of the old neighborhood still exists.

After the Disaster, it seemed that everyone who was left had lost everyone they knew. We were a city of strangers, desperately clinging to each other. Since then, it no longer mattered if you knew them or not, you imagined that you did.

Down the produce isle, I pass a guy I could swear I used to take a Taichi class with. He’s thumbing a melon and when he looks up at me, he smiles broadly.

“Hey buddy! These are on sale!” he informs me, his eyes bright and a little watery. He imagines he knew me from a book club he used to belong to. I smile and nod but pass up the bargain, directing my attention to a pile a grapefruits stacked in a huge cardboard box further down the isle.

The produce looks strangely perfect, plastic almost.

I don’t ask how they grow this stuff anymore. I don’t remember what fruit used to taste like, but these are more or less edible and that’s good enough for me.

I don’t share the rest of the neighborhood’s enthusiasm for shopping. Being around this many people just makes me think of the past. I remember chugging my way up Flatbush Ave, working hard against the steady incline of the road. I’m leaning forward over the handlebars, my body trying to fall up the gentle slope. Sweat tastes salty my lips. It’s June, so the sun is burning the back of my neck, tanning my arms a deeper shade day by day. My lungs fill with air, real air. It smells like car fumes, fried chicken and the pungent swill that sloshed out of the garbage truck left to bake on the hot asphalt.

The sweetest perfume.

The city is swarming with life, a dizzying array of movement. People move in and out of the electronics shops, pizza places, corner bodegas. They stand on the sidewalks talking on phones or chatting in groups, old people sit in front of their buildings on lawn chairs, the streets: the best entertainment they have left. Young professionals in short shorts jog past expertly dodging the constantly shifting maze of bystanders.

All those people, they represent the full range of appropriate ethnic diversity.

In the street, cars drag race each other from one traffic light to the next, as if a prize awaits the driver who reaches the next intersection first. Music booms out of their windows: Reggaeton, Hip Hop, Bollywood. A rusting fifteen year old Camry rattles plaintively from the thousand dollar sound system installed in its trunk. The drivers are constantly jockeying for position and I have a near death experience every other cross street I pass, yet it occurs to me how normal that was then. We all took risks with our lives, all the time. There was too much living to do, and our feet were firmly on the ground.

Up head, Grand Army Plaza comes into view, the entrance to the park with its enormous triumphal arch. I never bothered to find out who the ancient horse riding soldiers where carved along the arches upper sections. The arch isn’t there anymore, so I guess I’ll never find out.

The park is an oasis after the repressive heat of the asphalt and concrete. I find a shaded spot under a tree and lay out on the cool grass, a refreshing breeze chills my sweaty skin as I peer up through the dark green canopy. Families chattering in Spanish picnic nearby. Through the clumps of leaves and branches I see the sky, light blue, whips of cloud. It’s the most beautiful blue I’ve ever seen, it glows, illuminated, brilliant.

I daydream a lot like that, but I’m sure everyone does. I’ve passed plenty of people in these isles, just standing there, looking distracted. I know what there thinking about.

I don’t remember walking to the paper products isle, but I must have known what I was doing, I can use some TP.

At least the daydreams are pleasant, the good things we choose to remember. The nightmares are the other side of that coin, the yin to their yang, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who has them either. The nightmares usually start out the same way, Flatbush Ave, good clean chest aching exercise as I climb through the Heights. When it happens, its gradual, a subtle glitch in the matrix that no one seems to notice at first, an old woman and her push cart crossing the street, a couple of young boys mouthing oversized cones of shaved ice from a sidewalk vendor, a bike messenger racing down the opposite side of the street. They start to lift up, slowly at first and then building momentum, turning sideways and upside down. Even they don’t appear to notice what’s happening at first, skyward bound and oblivious. But before I know it, it’s happening all around me, dozens and then hundreds of people. Suddenly, everyone is screaming, flailing and thrashing helplessly, eyes and mouths wide with shock, uncomprehending, horrified.

Cars, people, their little dogs too, the sky is full of them. Were there ever that many people? Luminescent blue showing through an endless dirty smudge of bodies and animals and lawn chairs, their panicked twisting and flailing growing less obvious the further away they get. And they grow smaller by the moment, their screams: a chorus the size of humanity it self, growing fainter and fainter still.

And they’re all gone, all except for me. I straddle my bike on an empty street, empty sidewalks, empty shops. Why didn’t they take me?

I don’t know if that’s how it looked. I didn’t see it. 7:20 am, that’s when it happened. I was in bed asleep. The fall to the ceiling must have knocked me out, I woke up with the bed on top of me and it was over. I heard people yelling in the hallway, my apartment was upside-down and so was the world outside. The sky was gone, now just a black void yawning below.

The void waits patiently, it has all the time in the universe. No one knows how long we have, how long we can keep growing stuff, or finding fresh water, air to breath. Nothing like this has ever happened before, everyday is a gift, I suppose.

Speaking of gifts, someone gave me this old poster once, ancient, faded. It’s a dumb joke from the 70’s or something, that kitten hanging from a tree, hang in there, buddy. The guy who gave it to me thought it was real funny. I threw it in a closet and haven’t looked at it since. But it does make me laugh sometimes, just knowing he’s in there. How long has he been hanging there? Decades? If that cute little bastard can do, why can’t I, right?

Hang in there, buddy.

Students for Censorship

I am a faithful reader of The Vantage, but recently I’ve been disturbed to read some troubling articles publish in these very pages. You probably know the ones I’m talking about; subversive, threatening, most likely communist sympathizing. If I’d known that my fellow students were going to be expressing such dangerous ideas in my beloved Vantage, I would have eye-muffed myself. Rightly, these articles have caused quite a firestorm of outrage and whatnot. But it got me thinking about who truly is responsible. Surely the administration deserves some blame for allowing these subversive opinions to be expressed in the first place? Aren’t they at least partially at fault for encouraging students to think of The Vantage as a forum in which they can express their opinions? That’s why my proposal to the administration is simple, time-tested, and true. In a word: Censorship. Go ahead, say it a few times, let it roll around in your mouth a little. Sure it tastes nasty at first, but trust me, you’ll get used to it. It isn’t half bad once you become accustomed to the taste of bile. Think of all the unfortunate misunderstandings and heartache we could avoid if we simply controlled the paper’s content from the start. Why allow students to entertain wacky ideas of trying to “start a dialogue” (shudder), when we know we’ll just have to punish them for speaking out in the end? Let’s cut out the middle man and just take away the forum, or to be more precise, redirect it for the much more appropriate purpose of exalting the glorious status quo. If students get any ideas about freedom of speech or the like, they can go write for the suitably titled Naked City, or as I like to call it: The Sodom and Gomorrah Gazette. It’s time students learned an important lesson that will serve them well once they go out into the “real” world. And that lesson is that the word “freedom” back in the Founders’ day meant something slightly different than it does now. Owing to semantic shift the word “freedom” used to mean “correct, suitable or appropriate”. So when the Founders talked about “Freedom of Speech”, they actually were referring to the “Correctness of Speech”. Most people don’t realize that. Where was I? Anyway, my point is: let’s save ourselves a lot of trouble in the future and start correcting the speech of these wayward students before their harmful words reach my fragile eyes.

“DECENT WORK FOR DECENT PAY” Diplo

I love newness. I’m slightly obsessed with it. In music, it’s when you sense that moment of genius when the old forms begin to morph and evolve into something that didn’t exist before. It’s easy to miss, since the process involves elements which are familiar to us. All art is derivative and so, unless you haven’t been paying attention for a decade or two, there usually isn’t a definite moment of jarring disorientation. But we know we’re hearing something just a little different, the language has changed, the elements have been put together in new ways.

Not just any artist can push this process forward. Diplo, the Philadelphian dance music pioneer is one of those artists. As a DJ and producer, founder of the famous Philly club night, Hollertronix, and his own label, Mad Decent, he is the genius behind unstoppable jammy-jams like Santogold’s Creator as well as Newsflash, one of several versions of the Diplo Rhythm which keep surfacing with new vocalists.

He’s done painfully hip remixes for artists like M.I.A. (who he’s also dated), Block Party and Spankrock, not to name a million others and has built an impressive resume in just a few short years. Decent Work for Decent Pay is a somewhat comprehensive compilation of original works like Newsflash along with many of his remixes, like M.I.A.’s Paperplanes.

What’s fresh about a Diplo rhythm is its willingness to party with any genre. Depending on your context, he’s either a Hip Hop producer, a tweaker of hipster electronica, a forger of futuristic Dancehall riddims or a champion of Brazilian Baile Funk and seems to claim as much legitimacy in one as the next. As with most such innovators, his compositions are hot precisely for their fun, no-rules, quality. Beats are built around absurdly twisted vocal samples; comedic, compelling or deeply annoying depending on your taste. There are old school drum loops chopped up in spastic new ways, jittery and anxious like UK Grime but always managing to be euphoric and fun. You can hear a dance floor crowd go ballistic in your head to these stripped down beats and loops, retro-futuristic and irresistibly ridiculous.

Note: the downloadable version has about half the tracks that the CD version does, so try to find one of those shiny little discs people used to buy in record stores, whatever those are.

La música de Doom. 

DIGITALISM: Idealism (Astralwerks)

For me, the summer of 2007 was defined by Digitalism’s first full-length album Idealism, which came out in May and was listened to by yours truly almost continuously for the duration of that coming summer. Its rough dirty beats, gritty synths and surprisingly catchy vocal offerings served as an ideal soundtrack for my prowlings about the sweaty New York City streets. Stuffed into a subway car trying not to rub up against strangers, the distorted grooves surged insistently with the irrepressible energy of the city around me. Stylistically, they represented the emergence of a new indie culture as comfortable pumping devil horns in the air as shaking thang on the dance floor, a creative cross-roads: club music that rocks, hard.  

The album that defined my 2007 dropped out of my consciousness as soon as the year was done, that is, until recently when I stumbled upon On Hands Idealism which came out in December of 2008. While technically a remix album of their previous endeavor, many of the songs undergo radical treatment and stand up as unique and original tracks in their own right.  But mostly, the new release just reminded me how hard these beats rock, how the sputtering synth lines and occasional vocals carry unexpected hooks that remained barbed in me for months at a time, merits obvious in a way your body remembers more so than your head.

The German DJs turned remixers turned rockstars got their start in Hamburg in the early 00s and, fitting to their sound, have spent as much time on the festival circuit as in the clubs. Their debut single Zdarlight, which came out in 2005, begins with a groove lifted straight from their native German minimal techno origins, but opens up around mid track with an expansive anthemic almost-guitar line progression. Jupiter Room, another early 12” demonstrates their love of distortion, giving the repetitive programming a feel like living and dying rolled into one, strangely organic and mercilessly mechanical at the same time. The duo’s breakout club hit Digitalism in Cairo, their re-re-remix of the Cure’s Fire in Cairo established the obvious debt their sound owes to 80’s new wave and synth acts like Depeche Mode and Joy Division.

While I’m no longer prowling the streets of New York, Digitalism sees to it that I’m still sweating, not to mention shaking thang.     

BEIRUT: March of Zapotec & Realpeople - Holland (Pompeii Records)

What do you get when you lock a sorrowful indie rock crooner in a room with a Mexican brass band? 

In a word: awesomosity.

I’m aware that this word may not technically exist per se. If not, I will reserve the right to invent it for the purpose of describing Beirut’s stunningly original sound, mournful mail vocals paired fearlessly with the rich flush of tuba and trumpet. That this mind-blowing marriage works so well is testament to the creative genius of Beirut’s Zach Condon, New Mexican native who developed a love of brass folk music during his travels in Europe. At least this latest collaboration is geographically reasonable considering his origins; his first album, Gulag Orkestar, featured the backing of a Balkan gypsy oom-pah band. 

This time around, Condon finds himself working with the Jimenez Band from the state of Oaxaca, performing music written by him and featuring his beautifully sad, modestly melodramatic vocal stylings, compared at times to Rufus Wainwright or Stephin Merritt. The album opens with El Zócalo, a traditional and energetic romp recorded, it would seem, right on the street in the bands native environment. Then comes the stunning La Llorona, with its percussive, rolling, always off-accent horn stabs and Condon’s wilting lullaby. The middle of the track rises in a cinematic flourish, drum and symbol and swelling horns, like a Mexican western that never was. The result is beautiful and melodic, captivating in unexpected ways.   

The second half of the album introduces a new sound into the mix, melodic electronics and subdued dance beats, veering away sharply from the brass sounds of the first half but remaining firmly coherent thanks to Condon’s beautiful songwriting and mournful croon. Demonstrating an anything-goes ethic of song craft; guitar, horn, drum machine and synthesizer, Condon promises fertile creative ground and I know that I’ll have my ear to the soil, listening for the next unexpected crop.

Sholi  – Sholi (Quarter Stick)

Sholi are a Bay Area band whose impressive debut effort was released in February on Quarter Stick. This three piece make moody and ecstatic noise drawing from the coolest bits of fifty years of rock history. Duality persists as a running theme throughout this record; the contrast of light and dark, loud and soft, beauty and despair. The vocals are clean and even toned, almost without emotion. And yet the music drunkenly stumbles between extremes, reaching the highest highs and the lowest lows. It’s an unsettling experience, one’s footing never secure. But in letting go of your usual points of reference, in drifting free and trusting the journey, there are rewarding moments, uplifting and enthralling, all the more rapturous for the murk of lose and doubt through which you’ve come.

The album’s opener, All That I Can See sets the murky tone, a formless interchange of sounds, the guitars and drums searching for their parts, from which gradually emerge the gentle camp-fire strumming of acoustic guitar, a breathy sing-along, effortlessly melodic. Freeform experimentation gives way just as easily to grooving riff and funky drum, a rocking, swaying jangle of warm distortion, at times channeling the Doors, at others, Pavement.

You’ll appreciate their sound more if you’re one familiar with the dark side of the human soul, the depths to which you can fall in your own mind, all the while striving for release and renewal. I’m not sure if that release is truly found anywhere on this album, but the darkly beautiful discord of the guitars, the shuffling formlessness of the drums shifting always in and out of synch, suggests that release is just around the corner, if only we hold on a little bit longer.

Podcast Highlight: Dubstep FM (www.dopelabs.com)

The primordial sludge of UK underground dance culture has evolved beyond all reason in a short span of time, producing innumerable subgenres more like mad scientist experiments, groove and soul with artificial intelligence. In the eighties there was Acid House, a high tech and harder edged answer to Detroit House music, which grew into the dangerous DIY ethic of Rave from which came Techno, fast, hard beats as suited to moshing as to dancing. In the mid nineties the tempo went into overdrive with Jungle and Drum’n’Bass, James Brown and Lee “Scratch” Perry’s legacies cut, looped, distilled down and spit out at 3 X their intended tempos.

By the start of the current decade, American Hip Hop and old school House music again enforced their dominance, transforming Rave into Garage, equal parts good old fashion four on the floor party ‘till dawn and downtempo Anglo-Saxon meets Kingston beat poetry. Perhaps the greatest overachiever in the nations long history of cool, the Garage culture has produced even more experimental and edgy sounds with names like Broken Beat, 2-Step, and Grime, underground dance music of the most impenetrable variety, but has also produced breakout world famous phenomena like Mike Skinner AKA The Streets, Lady Sovereign, MIA and Dizzee Rascal.

Dubstep, one of the more interesting underground styles to come out of the scene in recent years can be heard on the Dubstep FM podcast (www.dopelabs.com), which, though based out of Seattle, produces long sweaty mixes by DJ’s from all over the US and Europe. Overachievers in their own right, they manage to produce fresh mixes - usually at least two hours long each - nearly everyday. Not that I have remotely enough time to listen to them all, but I’m rarely disappointed to drop in on them when I get the chance.

Dubstep is just the latest evidence of the irreplaceable roll Jamaican music and culture play in the UK musical underground, which has been shot through with Reggae and Dub influences over the past thirty years. Dubstep sounds like your friendly neighborhood Rasta beamed back from the twenty-second century. He has steel wool dreds and rocks the latest in Borg implants. Oh and he’s seen the end of the world and he’s here to let us know that it’s gonna hurt like hell, but that dance is the universal age old anesthetic for pain and suffering and that we may even learn to enjoy the mayhem. The mix skitters and lurches from track to track like cyborgs gone wild, with throbbing, stuttering sub-bass, jittery double-timed highhats and sluggish, thuggish downtempo beats. The marriage of laid back dub tempo and high-tech violence is unsettling to say the least, but that’s precisely what fascinates, a glimpse of our inhuman future for us to relish within or rail against. Either way, it’s a stage in our evolution that must be recorded…for the record.       

The New Al Qaida

The New Al Qaida?

 Should we be worried? Is it time to panic? Or should I watch a little less news? Perhaps it’s just the subject matter I’ve been reading about this semester: the CIA sponsored coup of the democratic Guatemalan government in the 1950s. Sometimes I get confused about what time and country I’m living in, but I know I’m being silly. Silly boy. That could never happen here, right?

Back then in Guatemala - totally different scenario - they had this powerful elite who’d gotten wealthy on the backs of the working man. And these elite were so threatened when a reformer president came along, popular and democratically elected, fair and square, that they engineered a “popular” uprising in the form of a military coup. The coup, of course, resulted in decades of brutal dictators who murdered anyone they even suspected of opposing them, the usual story. And all this because a handful of rich people didn’t want to pay slightly higher taxes. The reformers actually wanted that wealth to benefit the working man just a tiny little bit more than it was, which was not at all.

Commies.  

Of course, the rich people didn’t do it by themselves, they had to convince at least some ordinary people, preferably people with guns, that the reformers were evil conspirators, communists, tyrants, baby-eaters. I mean, they were going to raise the rich people’s taxes a little bit, if that doesn’t scream “tyranny!” then I don’t know the meaning of that word.

So in conclusion, that could never happen here…right?

Sure, I occasionally pick bits and pieces of loud angry rhetoric out of the ether, over the airwaves, accusing our democratically elected, fair and square, popular President of being a tyrant because he wants to raise rich people’s taxes a tiny little bit. I’ll give you that one. Sure, they’ve even dedicated a lot of funds and organizational savvy behind what would appear to be wide spread popular outrage over the tyrannical-ness of our new President’s policies concerning rich people’s taxes. There’s also some stuff about wanting to take people’s guns away from them, which seems to come out of left field (or would it be “right field” in this case?), but I won’t try and wrap my head around that one now, other than to point out that these outraged people are pretty much the ones who have all the guns.

So, yeah, there are some similarities if I let myself harp on it too much, but I’m a silly boy. Yeah, the government did just issue a report about “Right Wing Extremism” which might imply the existence of wide-eyed radicals huddled in a dank basement somewhere. And yet, from a wider perspective one would almost be inclined to include one of the largest media networks in the country in that description, with household verb/names like Rush and Bill who enjoy nationally syndicated radio and television programs reaching millions of ordinary Americans every day of the week.

I’ll admit it’s a little concerning to hear people with that much influence and reach branding our popular democratically elected President an illegitimate tyrant, and then to have almost those exact same words coming out of the mouths and off the placards of those same before-mentioned stunningly angry gun-owners on the streets of America the very next day. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if those exact same justifications are uttered from the mouth of the next Timothy McVeigh after he blows something up. I mean, what else can you do with a tyrant but blow up his buildings?   

But I’m probably just exaggerating. Either that, or these expert pundits and talk show hosts and their political cohorts are the most staggeringly irresponsible bunch of overgrown toddlers to ever hold the fate of our great nation in their hands at precisely the moment when we most need to work together if we’re going to pull ourselves out of this mess.

There is a deep and tragic irony in listening to the very people who gave us the most anti-Constitution president this county has probably ever seen, crowing loud and often about the supposed police state they think our current president is leading us to. These are the same people who brutally attacked anyone who dared to question our last walking tsunami of a president, calling us “traitors”, “Anti-American”, “terrorist supporters”, even though all our concerns turned out to be justified.

Does it make sense? Well, of course not. But neither does the toddler who’s just had his favorite toy taken away from him after he punches his sister. He screams, red faced and outraged, and his extravagant display of anger isn’t logical, but we don’t expect it to be. We understand that it’s just because the spoiled little brat’s never encountered disappointment before. He’s never had anyone take anything away from him, never taught to share, never heard the words “No, don’t do that. Bad boy!”.  As adults, we understand that losing an election is literally the worst thing that’s happened to him in his entire petty little life. He just doesn’t know any better.