Things I Am Looking Forward To In The 2016 Election
1. I am looking forward to 570 days of low-level irritation accompanied by a variety of outward demonstrations of disbelief and disgust that eventually fold into a deep and earnest concern for the optics of the actions of the world’s most powerful people. This period of engagement, which will produce no real effects outside of itself, will be followed by four days of pit-in-the-stomach fear that maybe all those stories about demographic inevitability were based in wishful thinking, and that those reassuring “projections” and “models” were concerned mostly with soothing their elite audiences, and that some ancient and latent political strain might suddenly activate, hurling the country, and possibly the world, into a new dark age, followed by the conclusion that none of this actually matters, because the global environmental and economic forces that will dictate the terms of the future are vastly underrated determinants, meaning that either candidate’s accomplishments will be remembered, eventually, as sad attempts to manage an accelerating entropy that will eventually dissolve and consolidate all nation-states that can only be understood, not managed, and which will be “governed” not with policy but according to theory, followed, finally, by the relief of the election of the candidate that we all knew was going to win way back in April of last year.
2. …