![]() I went to a few of Mark’s early campaign pressers, and there was this hush in the room, a kind of thankful glow, like everyone had walked in off the streets where a civil war was raging and into the sanctuary of a church. I mean it in the sense that after four years of Trump, of his endless verbal abuse, of subpoenas and FBI searches, of legislative attempts to curb the First Amendment, and of occasional press conferences that were more like Roman amphitheaters, encountering a presidential candidate who never got angry, never made threats, and (almost) never so much as got a fact wrong, let alone told outrageous lies without blinking, was, for the media, like dying and going to heaven. I don’t mean “had” in the sense of “owned”, even though by then the offspring of the Facebook Journalism Project had directed pretty much all the digital revenue dollars and a lot of the TV through Facebook. (And Ben Carson as VP was an inspired choice-you get more of the black vote and the conservative vote, with, like, zero risk that a president in his thirties is going to keel over and leave the veep running the show.) Of course he appealed to a huge swathe of the liberals, plus enough of the conservatives. And the opposite of him in every other way. Also a businessman and political outsider, also a white guy, also Christian-and I totally believe that, I don’t think he’d be capable of faking faith-but half Trump’s age. It was the sheer wearying noise of it, the anger and the yelling on all sides, like when you’ve had the TV on too loud for hours and you just want to switch everything off and lie down somewhere quiet and stare at the ceiling. It wasn’t only the egregious things, the wall and the trade war with China and the price swings and abortion curbs and voter disenfranchisement and the blatant, endless corruption and influence-peddling. But after four years people were just tired. Obviously, Trump wasn’t really the one governing, nor was he the first president to play figurehead while other people pulled the strings. And then, of course, there was the shitshow that ensued. He had broken down the biggest taboo-having a president who’s never held elected office. But still, there’s the old Mark grin, wide and optimistic, the grin that says nothing is ever that terrible or that hard to accomplish. He moves more carefully, deliberately, as if consciously reminding himself that he mustn’t move fast and break things anymore, because now the things he breaks can’t always be put back together. If he had seemed to enter a new phase of adulthood during the Trump years, now it’s as if he’s done so again. He’ll be 40 this year, the wunderkind finally reaching middle age, and the job has been hard on him-the basic income riots, the Saudi-Iran war, the Marburg pandemic, and the hurricane season of ’21, his first year in office, when there was still no FEMA and half of Florida was underwater. He looks up and grins, and I notice how the grin etches sharp lines into his face. “How’s the interface?” I ask, to get his attention. It’s not what he’s reading that interests him it’s how he’s reading it. At first I think he’s flipping through reports or trade figures, but he has that look that I’ve spent years getting to know-the calm, focused, critical expression that means he’s product-testing. If you didn’t notice the unusual thickness of his glasses, and the small black slab discreetly embedded in the desktop, you’d think he was practicing some kind of finger tai chi, or losing his mind. He’s making complex, balletic hand gestures, as if conducting a tiny, invisible orchestra on the surface of the wooden desk. He’s at the Resolute desk, which he’s had carefully restored to remove the gold leaf. I nod my thanks and push on the funny curved door that leads into the Oval Office. “He said to go in whenever you’re ready,” his secretary tells me. The day we hand over the keys… or the keys are handed to us. As the last incumbent would have said-”Nobody builds them like us, believe me.” Still. We built the biggest one in the world, remember. There could be indexing failures, field mismatches, table schema conflicts, a Russian hack… I’m kidding. Today is the day we switch the system on.Īm I nervous? Of course I am.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |