I’m a loser

The election is over and the media won. It’s not true but it sounds true. Or more accurately, the media lost sounds false because who cares what the media wins or loses. Do we get better TV if the media wins? Is it better if comedy gets better because the wrong guy won? Any sentence that begins with “Well, at least…” seems guaranteed to be a very small victory.

I’m not sorry the election is over. I’m sorry for all the hopes dashed, the look on my daughter’s face as she recalibrates how she feels about something she felt so important before the election. She’s surely engaged now, marching with her classmates on City Hall to protest the president she doesn’t recognize as legitimate. But she’s less committed to the “well, at least she won the popular vote.” A few days ago, she didn’t know what she was just about to lose.

I bet she’ll soon look back and realize her candidate already won more than this crummy election. She won the respect of all of us with her relentless struggle to win respect for her courage, her intelligence, even her futile attempts to protect herself from the deep personal anger that oozed out of her enemies. She lost the battle of the private server, but won the war by losing to another imperfect candidate. In defeat, they stand equal, which they are.

The media, which we don’t care won or lost, keeps going forward, imperfect as Brian Williams is, but with grace and courage in the face of surviving his failings and redefining a journalism that I find more interesting than the purity of being right at all costs. Of course I respect those who feel he sullied the art of no compromise. He exposed the sin of going for the laugh, of stroking the ego for daring to try something on the cusp of “news” and entertainment. Like Jerry Seinfeld, he exposed his joy at the pure mechanics and analytics of the news business, advancing the story by engaging not as a reporter but an actor.

I’m a loser, the song goes, and I’m not what I appear to be. And that’s a good thing, or so we hope. Our next president is a big loser in a million ugly ways, but if he somehow grows into the job the way our founding fathers and mothers did, he’ll be the kind of loser we need. Starting as a pompous, self-stroking bully, he and we have nowhere to go but up, and I find myself rooting for him to succeed. After all, who are we to judge about the truck he just caught? In an age of instant notifications, our job is to keep an eye on him. He seems equally dubious about both parties, for a start.

Funny thing about the Republicans: I found myself liking them more and more for their public service, mainly showing how to tie the opposition up in knots to slow down the tendency for us to pick winners and give them too much power. Instead, they show a blueprint for holding the president of whichever party accountable to the damage they could create, in this case, the destruction of our moral values, the fear and enslavement of our latest immigrants, the subjugation of the very people who brought us into this world.

I’m a Democrat; I bleed blue. I think the current president is doing a great job, and will even after he leaves office. But that doesn’t mean that the next one will be the opposite. There’s plenty of reasons why he could be the disaster we fear. We’ve spent the last 18 months living in fear of what we thought couldn’t possibly happen, and now I have the strangest sense of the possibilities looming in front of us. In a world where Twitter levels everything but ideas, where our phones are our eyes and ears into holding our leaders accountable, it’s possible, just possible, that you and I are not what we appear to be.