Warning: Political Content Ahead

One of the most infuriating moments for me on Election Night was when Steve Schmidt, on MSNBC, complained about the role the media played in electing Trump.  At which point I shouted at the television, “The media?  You are the media!”

So, really, thanks, media.  Thank you for giving Trump $2 billion in free air time.  Thank you, CBS Executive Chairman Leslie Moonves for ignoring the news and chasing after ratings — or, as you put it, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS… The money’s rolling in and this is fun.”

Thank you to nearly every talking head who let Trump surrogates spew their bile about Clinton as regularly as Old Faithful, without interrupting to say that you had asked about Trump, not Clinton, or bothering to correct all their lies.

Thanks to Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddows for talking about the election as something abstract and exciting and even fun — without once thinking of the people not in your positions of privilege for whom this isn’t a game, it’s their life.  And don’t worry — with your anodyne take on the news, you at least are certain to keep your jobs in the new Trump Administration.  Thanks to Andrea Mitchell and Maureen Dowd for your barely concealed dislike of Hillary Clinton, your columns and commentary little more than a couple of mean girls chortling in the girls’ bathroom.  Thanks to all the commentators who kept talking about the lack of excitement among Clinton voters, and ignoring the very real enthusiasm among her women supporters.

And special thanks for all the time you expended on Clinton’s faults and ignored Trump’s.  Trump raised more red flags than exist in all of China — his constant lying; his tax avoidance; his bankruptcies; his racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism; his connections to white supremacists; his ties with Russia; his fraudulent schemes and all the ways he cheated people; his narcissism; his poor impulse control; his ignorance about government and the US Constitution, and his lack of any interest in learning about them; his vicious insults, mostly against women and minorities; his sexual harassment of women — but, as I mentioned above, women didn’t really seem to be your focus in this election, despite the fact that history was being made by a woman before your eyes.

But even compared to all of this, the most important thing for you was Clinton’s emails.  When James Comey reported that he’d found yet more emails, your response was Pavlovian, a pack of salivating dogs chasing after the story.  And when it turned out there was nothing there — as usual — did we get a mea culpa?  Did we get any coverage of Trump’s vast unfitness to be president?  Did we hell.

Thanks — and I’m being sincere here — to the few heroes who tried to do real journalism.  Thanks to Joy Reid, David A. Fahrenthold, Kurt Eichenwald.  Thanks to the comedians who kept us sane, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Larry Wilmore, Bill Maher (though he’s still an idiot about some things).  And thanks to Khizr and Ghazala Khan, who, like so many immigrants, understand the United States better than most of us who were born here.

I just read Ursula Le Guin’s new book of essays, Words Are My Matter.  And the best thing I can do now is to quote from her famous speech accepting the National Book Foundation Medal:  “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope…We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.”