For nearly eight years we’ve had to put up with not just whining but vituperative outbursts at home, in classes, at work, on TV, in coffee shops, and in bookstores. Exposure to the enraged is very wearying, if not hazardous to one’s health. Most conservatives avoided political arguments because they often culminated in personal insults and screaming fits.
Frankly, I feared a McCain come-from-behind win because of the anger his victory would have unleashed. (Take the Proposition 8 protests in California and multiply by a thousand.) The Obama triumph, on the other hand, has triggered overwhelming exultation in those who voted for him and only anxiety and disappointment---but very few instances of anger---in McCain supporters. The emotion matrix looks something like this:
Economists say that we shouldn’t add someone’s joy to another’s sorrow--measuring the group’s overall welfare from the sum of the parts is a methodological minefield--but any married couple will tell you that they make those calculations all the time. He will go to the opera if she will go to the baseball game [reverse the pronouns’ gender to make the last sentence more palatable, if you like]. In either case the happiness experienced by one far outweighs the mild unhappiness and boredom experienced by the other, and the net wellbeing of the couple is positive.
From a group perspective an Obama victory means that we’ll all get along a lot better. My moderate unhappiness is quickly dispelled if everyone around me is smiling. And what is the value of a mildly satisfactory McCain victory if that means we have to be surrounded by apoplectic rage for the next four years?
Love is in the air. The esteemed Governor of California remarked that, although his candidate lost, I can get back into the bedroom, so there's the big advantage.
And it came to pass, in the months before Barack ascended to his high office, that the pony lay down with the pachyderm. © 2008 Stephen Yuen
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