#Nihilistic optimism drivers#

And then there was the messy relief-calculus of who actually deserved to feel relieved, and why, and for how long. There was, after all, still a lot of work to be done, and many ways in which to be horrified and disappointed by the American imperialist machine. I was feeling light, breathing easier, but I knew that was naïve. It had been two months since Trump was voted out of office, since friends and family and I, along with much of the country, had been able to get our first good night’s sleep in four years. On the screen, Biden was wearing his trademark black aviators and was flanked by Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the two Georgia Senate candidates for whom he was campaigning. The man stood still for a moment and observed, along with me, the upper half of a giant screen rising from a platform several hundred feet ahead of us. On my side of the fence, a man with a receding hairline and a mask that read DON’T DRINK THE BLEACH was peddling an impressive collection of buttons depicting Donald Trump in all manner of humiliating situations: he had T-rex arms, he was being devoured by the blue Twitter bird, he had horns growing out of his combover. Because of COVID-19, the rally was invite-only, meaning those of us not important enough to be invited were separated from the fleet of cars by a metal fence, which was being monitored by people in OSSOFF WARNOCK 2020 t-shirts.

#Nihilistic optimism drivers#

On the day before the January 5 runoff election, I was standing in downtown Atlanta near the Centennial Olympic Park, watching then-president-elect Joe Biden speak to a stadium-sized fleet of cars whose drivers had climbed onto their roofs and were clapping and cheering and waving American flags.