I love this cover. Grace Isabela Mills born Nov. 4, 2008, NYC
New York: For those of us born since World War II, never in our adult lifetimes (as the next First Lady undoubtedly meant to say last winter) has any single event made us prouder of our country—and for those of us who live in this city, never have we felt more completely in sync with it. We’re all Dorothy, stunned at having just stepped out—tripped out, one might even say—from a half-wrecked black-and-white reality into a strange and glorious new Technicolor world.
Moreover, for a lot of habitually skeptical, worrywartish New Yorkers, the thrill of victory is especially intense because we’d refused to indulge even a moment of premature celebration. Until late Tuesday night we couldn’t stop vividly, obsessively imagining the final (astonishing) agony of defeat. In fact, our local predisposition to faux-professional insiderism was enabled by this year’s unprecedented amount of public-polling data on the Web, all of which served to make us more nervous rather than less. Call it the anxiety of hope. And so for the last few days we have been experiencing not only the normal pleasures of virtue and our side’s triumphing, but also relief from the self-imposed pain of our variously hardwired Catholic, Jewish, African-American, or Charlie Brownian dread.
In other words, we denied ourselves irrational exuberance until the deed was finally done. And indeed, while his election will first and forever be understood as a fantastic moment in the history of racial progress—and the triumph of unity over division, the promise of change over the power of the status quo, blah-ba-de blah blah blah—it was also a rejection of ad hominem assertion, atavistic demagoguery, make-believe innuendo, and the fervently ideological. Even-keeled cool beat splenetic fear and confusion. Reason won.
I love this cover. Grace Isabela Mills born Nov. 4, 2008, NYC
