Reading through a pile of The New Yorker(s)

I must acknowledge The New Yorker for taking on this new President with such syncopated vehemence, a drum-beat from the editor on down, but after reading through a stack of magazines the other night it began to sound like listening to two people of like minds talking to themselves over coffee: you know what they're going to say before they say it. I'm not sure though how much new information can ever be gleaned from the constant examination of pre-existing conditions. To the liberal mind Trump is a nightmare, having pretty much scrambled all the usual, once reliable signals, but to be dismissive is to miss the point.

What's missing is the other side. And it's not just The New Yorker, it's the whole tribe (The New York Review of Books et.al) telling the same story, aghast but in the dulcet tones of the English language taught at proper university's and then refined in the rarefied atmosphere of high-paying journalism. I can almost see the writers writing, shaking their heads as they write, getting up to stretch their legs, meeting colleagues in the hallway also shaking their heads. Trump is a liar, and he's vulgar, and worse he has no respect for the office, the institution of the presidency. It's a disaster. They've never seen anything like it. And so on.

I yearn to know what it's like to be a Trump man or a Trump woman. To get inside the mind of at least one person who voted for Trump, like one of the ones I see on tv, wildly cheering at a Trump rally in Ohio. Fox News really doesn't give it to me, partly because I don't trust Fox News, it's over-managed propaganda with reporters wound-up by management to spew the party line and with anchor people who dine with the POTUS. Nor does C-SPAN deliver, as much as I appreciate C-SPAN. C-SPAN relies almost exclusively on visuals, cinema verite-esque, witholding the actual language of those it films. And CNN and the others are making record-profits on Trump, which no doubt tints the color of their coverage.

So what would this Trump voter say if he or she were to speak to me and I were to listen? 

Brooks, what if you knew you were going to lose no matter what you did. That no matter what you did it would never be enough to make you happy or equal to others above you or free from worry about money?

I suspect he or she would say things like, I'm in a great deal of pain, the pretty picture I was drawn of America does not match up with the reality. I'm getting nowhere no matter how hard I try. 

I don't know this for sure, but the moment I try to construct a narrative for this thing I can't understand--that Trump won the presidency in this case--I feel  a little clearer about the situation, having at least tried to see how things look from a perspective so different from mine (thinking this way also permits me to understand wealthy Republicans who voted for Trump because they just plain don't like government, or paying more than the tiniest, tiniest bit for it).

In Mississippi recently, a red state, I drove through town after town that had lost their downtowns. The charming old buildings--drugstore, furniture store, dress shop--were boarded up, vacant. "They're never coming back," said my friends who live in Mississippi. In the little town of Ruleville there was a statue of the civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977). A black woman, at one time a sharecropper, victim of more than one police beating, recipient of a hysterectomy without her consent by a white doctor as part of the state of Mississippi's plan to reduce the number of poor blacks, Hamer once said, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." Most likely the people who voted for Trump feel something like Fannie Lou Hamer felt, perhaps with less reason or logic for feeling it, though I wouldn't know from reading The New Yorker.