by The upper South Island of New Zealand was rocked by a large earthquake on Sunday night at around midnight. Two people were killed and several more injured. Kaikoura is a mess, and unless you’ve got a boat or a chopper it’s completely isolated, especially if you’re a cow. The quake was felt very strongly in Wellington, where they’re being pummelled by regular aftershocks. I’m glad to be away from it all. Some buildings have been condemned. I think mine is OK apart from some superficial cracks, similar to what we experienced in 2013, but I haven’t heard any confirmation of that.
Today I popped into that “promising” language school, so promising that they hadn’t communicated with me since then, apart from the occasional thumbs-up on Facebook which I only joined because of them. But there’s good news. They want me to run my first “conversation club” on 9th December. The marketing manager phoned me later in the day to invite me over to his flat on the seventh floor of a sixties tower block near the train station. By his own admission the building is an eyesore with barely tolerable noise levels thanks to trains, trams and cars. I met his wife, Simona, and for once I was able to speak a fair bit of Romanian. I probably surprised him with how much of the language I knew. When he corrected me I was grateful. I accepted Simona’s offer of food, expecting a biscuit but getting a meal of meat patties, pickled cabbage and bread. Seriously yum! I’d already had lunch at the market but I didn’t care. Days like today make me feel that it’s all worthwhile.
I’m getting better at picking elections. I spoke to Dad on FaceTime soon after the result became apparent. He called my just-out-of-bed hairstyle presidential (ha!). It had been a long, dark night. I didn’t want Trump to win. In a fellow human being I like to see humility, compassion and respect. He showed virtually none of those qualities throughout the whole campaign. I get why people voted for him. They’d had enough of being neglected by career politicians, people like Hillary Clinton. But they didn’t just get Donald Trump (if it was just him I wouldn’t be that bothered). America is so depressingly partisan now that the vast majority of voters no longer think. They don’t split their ticket; instead they support their team, red or blue, all the way. So by pulling the lever for Trump, they also got the rest of the Republican Party, people who don’t believe in evolution or man-made climate change, people who don’t believe in universal healthcare, paid maternity leave or a minimum wage.
For all the talk of the white working class voting against the so-called elite (and Donald Trump isn’t part of the elite?), and the Democrats neglecting their support base (if you follow British politics, that might sound familiar), one factor played an enormous part in this election and it’s hardly got a mention. Five years ago I wrote that geography would eventually become irrelevant in elections: why do you have to live next door to someone who shares your interests when you can insta-whatsit them online? But in those five years the opposite has happened. People are living closer to like-minded people. For those who lean left, that tends to mean clustering more and more tightly in urban environments. And it’s very electorally inefficient for parties on that side of the political spectrum in countries with FPTP systems, in particular the US. When it comes to the presidency, the Republicans win all the small states which have more electoral votes per capita than the large states. They also win a majority of the states (even when they lose the popular vote as they did this time), and now that most people just vote straight-ticket red or blue, they then pick up a majority in the Senate too. As for the House, well the Republicans, who control most states, can gerrymander the hell out of them because it’s so much easier to draw an advantageous map when your opponents live in such tightly-packed zones. That’s part of why, even though the Democrats have at least as much support as the Republicans, and Clinton will wind up with a near-two-point popular vote margin once all the votes are counted, they’re triply screwed right now. Of course if the US had a 21st-century electoral system instead of an 18th-century one, none of this would matter.
I should point out that I was never a Clinton fan. I was supporting Bernie Sanders during the primaries.
