Do you know anyone who has a Kindle? Now that I’m over here I’d like to see one. The perception from the UK — based entirely on photographs and John Gruber’s cynicism — is that it’s a ridiculous device. I’m unsure what to make of it really. I like tactility; I like books.
I cannot vote in this election. I’m a British man, I’ve lived in San Francisco for only a few months, but I’ll be living in this country for years, I hope.
I’ve arrived just in time to to witness the spectacle of a US election.
Not being permitted to vote, I’m just an observer here. But yet the result of this election affects me as much as any American.
I moved here from the UK, a country which has developed a complex tolerance and integration between multiple cultures, races and religions. Sometimes it falters and struggles, other times it forms a glorious melting pot of culture.
We — countries of the western hemisphere — defined the modern world and our reward is to have countries of diversity. Countries that attracted people of all races together and whose coming together makes for a better society, an outright better humanity.
Without a vote, I haven’t chosen a party. Whilst I know the history and the global influence of presidents from both parties, there’s no value in choosing sides.
As such, I can just observe and judge these politicians as people.
It’s with utter disgust, then, that I should see a man and a woman running for the highest office in the land, two of the most influential and powerful political positions on earth, and embrace hate as their aid in seeking election.
How can you knowingly embrace the politics of fear? How can you sit easily with yourself whilst carelessly throwing out the much-abused word ‘terrorist’ to provoke completely unrelated emotional reactions? Driving people to your cause through fear? That is terrorism.
This country is divided. And to see you allow a minority faction of the less progressive sections of this broad and vibrant society flare up in violent rhetoric, racism and untethered abuse is abhorrent.
If elected by my peers, you will be a president and vice president of people of every nation, race and colour. Not just the peace loving people all around the world, but right here within these boarders. In provoking hate toward large sections of that society, I do not understand why you would run for an office which represents them.
You have an opportunity to set an example of tolerance and maturity for the world to see, at a time when society is exaggerated as going wild. Instead you appear as manipulative and savage as some of your enemies.
On the presentation of voter breakdown in the United States, the division it perpetuates, and the fact that it’s horribly wrong and over-emphasises a party-political divide between coastal and central states.
However well-intentioned it was, the catastrophic and unpopular intervention in Iraq has served in some parts of the world to discredit the very idea of western democracy. The recent collapse of the banking system, and the humiliating resort to semi-socialist solutions, has done a great deal to discredit - in some people’s eyes - the idea of free-market capitalism.
Democracy and capitalism are the two great pillars of the American idea.
To have rocked one of those pillars may be regarded as a misfortune.
To have damaged the reputation of both, at home and abroad, is a pretty stunning achievement for an American president.