Waiting For The Fat Lady To Sing

I am never good at speculating on outcomes, having been conditioned by my mother from childhood on to anticipate disastrous reversals, as we listened to the story of her first husband's sailing for France as a soldier in the First World War only to be felled by the Spanish Flu before he even entered battle. This inducement to foreboding was augmented in my early childhood when my father kissed us all goodbye  as he left with some colleagues to drive off to a conference only to return in a coffin after a head on collision four hours later which killed almost all of them.  So I have a hard time listening to my husband tell me the latest projections of Nate Silver and the other pundits on the fate of Trump and Clinton in the upcoming election.  My husband is jubilant, my trainer at the gym keeps telling me it is a "done deal."  And I smile and say to myself "not so fast."  As a professional classicist I tell myself the story of Oedipus who left what he thought was his hometown and in so doing proceeded to rationalize all the conceivable obstacles to avoiding disaster, only to discover in the end that his worst fears were realized.  In the times I have lived in Italy and Greece I took comfort in the sense of foreboding that informed casual conversational comments about future events; I consider it a habit of mind inherent in Mediterranean peoples, although I suppose one might put it down to the experience of living through the events of the twentieth century in that part of the world.  It is tortuous to live through expectation and foreboding for so many months.   The campaign season should be limited by law as it is in Europe.  I am sure that what prevents that here is the television advertisers who profit so from this circus of politics.  We now have degenerated into a public entertainment aided and abetted by those professional entertainers called newscasters.  The televised debates have been a scandal, the one candidate who comes from the world of entertainment would be more suited to debating with someone like Kim Kardashian.  The descent into so sordid a level of campaign oratory and behavior is the direct result of allowing Fox News to pretend to be anything other than entertainment, but I am beginning to froth at the mouth, so shall stop.  But I can't help thinking of that earnest, idealistic, ambitious, moral and thoughtful Wellesley college student giving her speech, thinking to herself, as sometimes she must, "has it come to this?"