George Blaustein

This had lots of great stuff that shouldn't've been great, like Joshua Cohen's Atlantic City memoir/musing on Trump and Chris Christie, or Thomas Bolt's story written from the perspective of a withdrawn fourteen-year-old upper-middle-class American girl on holiday with her family and her sexy babysitter in Italy, but it also had the worst piece of crap story I've ever read in this magazine, one that almost led me to cancel my subscription, about the fear and loathing that descended the night of the election, by Marco Roth, and how betrayed and anxious he and his fucking New York literati friends felt. There are a lot of awful gems: "Who will be the one to betray us to Trump’s Gestapo or shoot us on the barricades?" But here is the paragraph worth quoting in its entirety, the one that nearly made me plotz:

Beneath the shock, guilt creeps in alongside the sense of failure. Everyone here has volunteered for the Democratic Party. Could we have done more? Should we have done more? Pushed harder, launched ourselves more fervently and earlier into more difficult places? One’s sense of agency begins to weaken. This is a room of doers, achievers, people used to seeing their efforts rewarded. We begin to feel like the young white woman we spoke to earlier. She’d voted for Trump, she admitted, but we shouldn’t worry, she always gets everything wrong, her life a succession of bad choices. She doesn’t know how to pick a winner. “Yeah, he’s an asshole,” she said, “but I just don’t like Her.” While she talked, her toddler, cashew-toned, blue-eyed, biracial, played happily with other darker-skinned children in the front yard. We wanted to tell her that her choices hadn’t let her down as much as she thought, but that she had let herself and those choices down when she voted.

You get one more chance, n+1.… (más)