You know when you're a kid, and you put your hands over your eyes in the belief that if you don't see it, it will go away?
Well, I spent yesterday in that mentality. When I went to bed Tuesday night, the exit polls were positive, and indications such as turnout in urban areas was up. On the Beeb a Democrat was chirpy, a Republican glum. I went to bed and asked Jimmy to wake me up when he got up. He woke me up and I groaned, so he left and came back a few minutes later to say Bush had won.
I alternated between ignoring it and trying to decide what to say. Then I thought I would wait for the papers, and I find that Brian Reade has said exactly what I would have liked to have said - God Help America
I'm not one of those who believes that the end of the world is nigh. The world has always been a belligerent place. And I don't think it makes a spot of difference which of two conservative parties has charge of the US Presidency.
But I certainly don't have any hope for resolution of problems. I was going to say that the gravest is Palestine, with its treatment by a hawkish-to-the-extreme Israeli government bankrolled by the USA. But I don't think that global poverty, not least AIDS in Africa, and elsewhere is any less of a problem. Nor is Climate Change.
A benign progressive US President with the ability to take his population with him, could make a massive change for good in those areas. George Bush will continue not to do so.
There are issues of domestic policy that it is simply not my business even to comment on.
But in areas like stem-cell research, even if it is primarily a domestic issue, it is one with global significance. Of course stem cell research is going on in progressive countries, but scientific progress happens more quickly with true international co-operation.
I use the word 'progressive', and that really is one of the great dilemmas about the USA. I don't think any other nation on earth manages to combine such a combination of progressive, liberal, innovative, outward-looking populations in the great population centres in the North East and the West Coast, and elsewhere, with such a bunch of neanderthal ignorant and reactionary...rednecks...in the rural and Southern hinterlands.
