From an article in G2
From an article in the Guardian's G2 section today:
Despondency was instant and lethal. On the way to work, the faces of people on the tube looked like chalk pavement pictures after a downpour. As people got to their desks, a day began of low productivity and high personal email exchange. Dismally, people asked each other how long they had stayed up the night before. "Until 4.30am," said my friend Jim. "Long enough to start crying like a girl."
The first email I received the following morning read: "Fucked off, dejected, our hopes have been blown to shit." The next one read: "As REM once sang: 'It's the end of the world as we know it.' Only unlike REM, I don't feel fine."
There's going to be a brain drain from this country which will leave the Red-State [Republican] morons to fend for themselves," wrote an American on the Guardian talk-boards. "I wonder what the immigration requirements are like in the UK?"
"The one consolation that people are clinging to is that he will fuck things up so badly in the next four years that the Democrats will move back into favour. That's if we still have a world."
If there is such a thing as collective depression, then the circumstances of the election are just right to encourage it. Depression is not a very focused thing and yesterday's mood was universal only in that it allowed people to group their individual reasons for cheerlessness around the huge disappointment of the election result.
"Ach," says Oliver James, the clinical psychologist. "I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s and thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is leading?'"
If people seemed disproportionately miserable yesterday, then it is because, he believes, the election result is not abstract political background to the daily business of living; there are many who will feel that George Bush in the White House compromises their personal safety. "There might be a feeling that a dirty bomb exploding in London is more likely to happen with the policies pursued by a Bush government. People may be taken back to the generalised sense of dread that was widespread before 1988 and the end of the cold war. This complete nutter in the White House and Blair with the wild look in his eyes ... "
Despondency was instant and lethal. On the way to work, the faces of people on the tube looked like chalk pavement pictures after a downpour. As people got to their desks, a day began of low productivity and high personal email exchange. Dismally, people asked each other how long they had stayed up the night before. "Until 4.30am," said my friend Jim. "Long enough to start crying like a girl."
The first email I received the following morning read: "Fucked off, dejected, our hopes have been blown to shit." The next one read: "As REM once sang: 'It's the end of the world as we know it.' Only unlike REM, I don't feel fine."
There's going to be a brain drain from this country which will leave the Red-State [Republican] morons to fend for themselves," wrote an American on the Guardian talk-boards. "I wonder what the immigration requirements are like in the UK?"
"The one consolation that people are clinging to is that he will fuck things up so badly in the next four years that the Democrats will move back into favour. That's if we still have a world."
If there is such a thing as collective depression, then the circumstances of the election are just right to encourage it. Depression is not a very focused thing and yesterday's mood was universal only in that it allowed people to group their individual reasons for cheerlessness around the huge disappointment of the election result.
"Ach," says Oliver James, the clinical psychologist. "I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s and thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is leading?'"
If people seemed disproportionately miserable yesterday, then it is because, he believes, the election result is not abstract political background to the daily business of living; there are many who will feel that George Bush in the White House compromises their personal safety. "There might be a feeling that a dirty bomb exploding in London is more likely to happen with the policies pursued by a Bush government. People may be taken back to the generalised sense of dread that was widespread before 1988 and the end of the cold war. This complete nutter in the White House and Blair with the wild look in his eyes ... "
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