Hello! Anyone out there? Is it safe to come out now? Can I switch on the TV without hearing someone slandered? Do I still have to cover the children's ears to protect them from salacious debates? Please tell me it's over.
I emerge from my cave to find democracy in tatters and numb figures stumbling along the boulevards. The ignorant armies have clashed by night and now we must make sense of it. The talk of groping may be over but the groping for meaning is just beginning.
What an ordeal. For months my fevered mind cringed at the spectacle of the titanic battle between the rotten liars on one side and the rotten liars on the other. If I hear the word email once more I may explode.
At night, supposedly safe in bed, no rest came for the weary. Once the light was switched off, the phantoms appeared. Who was that woman in the pants suit anyway? Who was that man wearing a helmet of hair? They shrieked and rattled their chains. I could only shriek in my fitful slumbers.
What is that I hear now? Cheering? I do believe it is cheering and celebration! One party is happy in the land of the highly depressed. Hurrah for our side, they shout, disturbing the vultures picking over the carcasses of good intentions. How about a hurrah for the rest of us, the poor survivors?
Now another sound is on the wind, this one very distant, a muffled roar, coming over the seas from faraway. Are they English voices? Yes, by golly. "Good old Yanks, eh? Their process managed to be just as embarrassing as ours with our silly Brexit vote. Yes, they took the heat off us, old boy, which was dashed sporting of them."
At this, nausea overcomes me and I am forced to seek the convenience of a trashcan full of election-related propaganda. I look up and see figures in archaic clothing moving through the rubble. They are the Founding Fathers. Do I wake or sleep? Perhaps I have lost my hold on reality _ there has been a lot of that going around lately.
Yet here is George Washington and he looks real enough. "I warned them," I hear the great man say, "it is in my farewell address. I warned them of the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party. Factions agitate the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindling the animosity of one part against the other. I told them but they did not listen."
"You are right, Mr. President," says a wry looking fellow who turns out to be Benjamin Franklin. "Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days but election campaigns begin to smell like a fish market after just three months."
As they disappear into the smoke, another familiar figure emerges. Why, it is Winston Churchill. What is he doing here? Haven't we had enough superior English people commenting on our sorrows for one day? But he has an announcement: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried."
Really, Winston? You came here to tell us that after what we have been through? This is supposed to make us feel better?
Suddenly, all is bathed in an extraordinary bright light. A great multitude is gathered around a magnificent figure whose face of shining radiance I cannot look upon. Surely one so wonderful must be Donald Trump.
No, it is the Lord Almighty. I repent of confusing the two but it's an easy enough mistake to make. Cherubim, seraphim, spin doctors, advisers, all the same really, Why, Chris Christie looks like a cherub with his little wings vibrating above the George Washington Bridge.
The Lord speaks in majestic voice, sounding a bit like Churchill but perhaps that's because I have lately become a member of the Anglican faith. "Knowest this," the Lord is saying, "American exceptionalism, which hath bathed this land in divine grace for generations, is hereby ended. Enough is enough already."
This is terrible. All I can do is search in the gloom for my sense of humor, essential for surviving the next four years.
A street cleaner comes by, picking up the piles of broken promises. "Do you know who won?" he asks. "Beats me," I say, "I have been living in a cave, just as my readers have long suspected. And what does it matter? What good can possibly come from this horrible election campaign?"
