Elizabeth Kolbert gets close to it in the New Yorker:
One way to understand the up-is-down logic of this election is as an expression of what might be called American sentimentalism. What moves the electorate is not true facts but true feelings.
Donald Trump is the kind of jerk who authentically, genuinely, unabashedly inhabits his own jerkiness…. His narcissism, petulance, and whatever other character flaw you care to choose aren’t under wraps; they’re on view for all to see and hear. In this sense, he truly is the real thing.
Clinton, meanwhile, is constantly role-playing. On the campaign trail, she displays an interest in people that, one can only assume, she doesn’t always feel. In her speeches, she invokes lofty ideals, when doubtless she’s often motivated by expedience.
A libido is trustworthy. It just is what it is. Same’s true of a rock. A person, that’s complex, a person has layers, makes choices, compromises, gets compromised. But for better or worse we need persons for president, not rocks or libidos, let alone libidos who claim the prerogatives of rocks – rolling, falling, being thrown, raining down – because we need choices made on our behalf by folks we’ve judged competent to make them.
Make it new, yes, it’s my poetics. But not in hate. If it’s hate, just stop.
I’m really scared. Don’t even know how scared to be – Nate Silver can’t, it turns out, tell me how certain to be about uncertainty. How little we know about anything, probability, uncertainty, other minds, values we thought we shared, really is coming home to me. But whatever happens next week, some kind of work of reconciliation has to begin.
Please vote? for a person who behaves as one? treats others as such?
And I seem in my assembly to mean something about magical thinking.
Elizabeth Kolbert, who tells us, career-long and with a cool head, of the maybe end of the world. Ice sheets, new inches of ocean. That we can think at all is magical – matter’s astonishment – and no guarantor of persistence.
the art of compost 