Sad

This is the New Yorker's new cover, which it originally was going to use to mark the election of Hillary Clinton as the first woman to become U.S. President.

Now Hillary is on tour with her new book about the campaign, and interviews are appearing (including with the New Yorker.)  Again she is the center of controversies.  Everyone has an opinion on why she lost, most of them, in my view, being predictable ex post facto nonsense, each feeding on the other with false premises and lazy conclusions.

 A combination of coincidences and a nefarious plot by a foreign enemy state with the knowledge and collusion of the other candidate, fed currents deep in this country's collective unconscious, and too many American responded by doing something it takes very little intelligence to know was stupid to the point of crazy.

She was not the greatest candidate running the best campaign.  But that is essentially meaningless.  Everybody gets one vote, and they're supposed to figure it out.  My view today is the same that it was on election night: this is on you, America.  You broke it.  Now you're paying for it.  Along with the rest of the world and the future.

The same media system, the same culture that wants to apportion blame, deserves their own seldom acknowledged piece of it.  Did anybody learn anything?

Meanwhile, this country without question would be better off right now if she had won.  And so we can for a moment imagine what it would have meant to the present and the future if in 2016 America could have had the moment imagined in this cover.