Years ago my wife and I were living in Spain, and our landlord invited us to spend a weekend in their cabin outside Madrid. Sunday morning he drove us to a nearby village in search of folklore and local wine. A small glass cost five pesetas. “In the next village they demand ten pesetas,” said the landlord, and explained, “That’s a Moorish village.”
I am aghast at the results of November’s elections, aghast at the crowd taking over the White House tomorrow. I am aghast at the misjudgment of the electorate, which I attribute to the millions of nominal Americans who don’t live on my street and who don’t understand the world or their own country or even their own interests well enough to know what they were doing. But Trump, I think, is as much a cartoon to southerners as he is to us up here, just a less malevolent one. When a region’s default position is “Hillary = evil,” that has a way of putting lipstick on an orange-hided Swabian.
