MAGAlopolis

Sally Olds watches the US election with some local Trumpians

There are some reporters who spend their professional lives chronicling the political views of people they hate or vehemently disagree with or, at least, find utterly strange: Michael Moore, Louis Theroux, and at home, John Safran, Tom Tanuki. I am not one of them. For one thing, I find it hard to sustain hatred or vehement disagreement for very long. This isn’t a moral virtue—it’s probably a moral failing, if anything—but before I can grow my rage and disavowal to any great heights, I return to my resting state of base curiosity. For another, it’s too close to gotcha journalism, very 2000s, and those who practise it tend to operate at the same frantic pitch as the people they’re chronicling; in the closed loop of action and reaction for content, the antifa commentator needs the fascist, the fascist content creator needs the antifa TikTok baddie, Rachel Maddow needs Joe Rogan, Avi Yemini needs FriendlyJordies. On top of this, there are other, more interesting, perhaps more generative, things to learn and write about—like the fact that on Swanston Street in the 1950s a lesbian named Val Eastwood ran a booming coffee lounge for queers, or that Uncle Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta was arrested on his eighty-second birthday for defending ancient-growth forests from logging, or that when setting up a garden bed you should layer the worm castings near the bottom because that’s where worms live and defecate when left to their own devices in the wild. But when I wake up on the 6th of November, the day of the US election, I know there is only one thing I want to do.

The morning has dawned overcast and humid, with a fierce, hot wind that lifts the sheets on my washing line into horizontal planes. Very bad, very very bad, I hear in my head, in Trump’s voice. Asking around, I learn that people are either assiduously avoiding the whole thing or dedicating themselves to a full day of Fox News. Nobody who is watching the election is watching it alone. One needs to be witnessed witnessing world history. It’s Wednesday, and Melbourne is exiting the long Cup Day holiday weekend. On the tram, on the streets, there is an edgy, hungover energy. Every cigarette I smell somehow intensifies the weather.