Terry Prone: What does the media focus on now that Trump has lost?
Now that a divisive Donald Trump has lost, will outrage levels return to normal? Picture: Mark Pynes/The Patriot-News via AP
In the middle of a Zoom call, I get distracted by the full frontal exposure of all of the participants. Not that any of them are engaged in exhibitionism.
What’s weird is that each and every one of them is neatly centred in shot, although some of them are so low in the picture, they look like moles trying to come out of a self-dug hole and not really succeeding.
Because they’re all right in the middle and facing forward, individually, people on Zoom look like TV newsreaders in the 1960s. Collectively, they looks like a line-up of WANTED posters.
We don’t do this in real life at meetings. Or in any other communication. We sit down kitty-corner to each other and talk at a slight angle. Unless, of course, we’re gardai interrogating someone suspected of an evil deed.
This isn’t Zoom’s fault, but what’s with us that we can’t be more imaginative in our approach to meetings onscreen?
However, one thing that IS Zoom’s fault is the placement onscreen of their icons allowing each participant to see more or fewer participants. On a tablet, that icon sits pretty much directly over the camera, so anyone who wants to change what they’re seeing or depart the meeting has to give everybody else a massive closeup of their hand in a way that looks like assault.
Hate to admit it because of who they are, but that Amazon ad with the ballerina is a heartstring puller. Not quite up there with the Barry’s Tea toy train ad, but moving, nonetheless, and specific to our times.
Covid-19 has changed the morning sky. Dawn, when you live on the flight path from Dublin Airport, always used to offer the joy of pencil thin contrails out over the sea, lit by the copper of the rising sun, fattening to fill the sky with parallel fake clouds. This morning, just one.
I wonder, too, if the pandemic hasn’t generated a new kind of beach visitor. The dawn swimmers come first, the beach walkers visit at various times during the day.
But, between those groups, every day, comes one individual. Or two, separated from each other by time. Different people, each morning. More men than women. Linked by loneliness and similarity of action. Each individual walks to the water’s edge and stands just clear of the incoming waves. Hands in pockets or sometimes just hanging by their sides.
They don’t look around them, these people. They’re not bird watchers or shell-gatherers or jet-trail admirers. These are people who look into a fixed point in the middle distance. Never glancing left or right.
Rigid, unflinching gaze. The stance so unchanging, the seabirds get used to them and come close in their food-searches.
I don’t remember these lonely sea-watchers in any other autumn. When they leave, they leave without seeming to have gained anything from their long watch. They just leave, hands rammed deep in pockets, their gaze path never rising above the damp sand.
For the first time ever, I’ve gone cold turkey on a US Presidential election. I cannot bring myself to tune into the count coverage beginning on every radio station. Enough, already. Cut to the chase. Give me the results. Spare me the melodrama and the commentary.
Into this created vaccuum, PR doyenne Mary Finan drops a little gem. Commenting on a reference in this column to her, 50 years ago, using one of Aer Lingus’s two new 747s to stage a fashion show out over the Irish Sea, Mary asks if I don’t remember Maeve Binchy’s comment, as she was guided to her seat among the great and the good of Ireland’s women journalists at the time.
I don’t.
Apparently, Maeve looked at the massed gathering of female hacks and murmured: “God, if this flight goes down, there’s going to be great jobs on offer.”
Venturing to a shop in the early morning, I accidentally break my own ban on listening to election coverage. The car radio comes on, unasked, and I hear Trump claiming that it’s all over bar the shouting, this election. He’s won. Or maybe was this close to winning when something stopped.
It’s not clear what stopped, but stopped it did, and the courts have to fix it. I sit in the car park, mystified. Trump is followed by the presenter sucking their breath in between their teeth with such force, it’s a miracle she doesn’t ingest several thousand listeners.
And therein lies part of the Trump problem. Now that he has lost, media’s in trouble. He’s more addictive than nicotine. Like the Barbarians in Yevtusheko’s poem, he is some kind of a solution, every day, to the needs of mass and social media.
Without him, outrage will drop back to normal levels. Some commentators are going to have a problem managing without being able to express moral outrage on a daily basis.
I find myself laughing at the number of people apologising, at Zoom meetings, for being so hungover from watching late night US election coverage. Just from alerts on my phone, I know as much as they do without being steeped in statistics.
This is the way to do elections, I believe. Don’t get bogged down in the process. End results are all that matter. I know it was a bit tough on Nora Owen, but it was still a mistake to do away with those voting machines.
And, while I’m making myself unpopular. The Democrats need help. They are convinced that simply because they exist and are committed in a cosmic way to doing the right thing, this, by inference, makes the considerable swatch of the American voting public which has just gone for Donald Trump – again - deplorable.
If the Democrat portrayal Trump voters as backwoodsmen drinking home-stewed hooch and shooting possum for breakfast were accurate, Biden would have no problem.
But that cohort also comprises a fair few educated urban middle class who wouldn’t know one end of a shotgun from another. They don’t like globalism or the gig economy because it has damaged them, personally, see their faith as coming under threat and fear environmental action may dinge the economy.
The Democrats, instead of solving their problems, are preaching at them and demonising them. Well, in fairness, some Democrats. Biden a notable exception.
I remember being half dead with excitement when Obama won. Today, I find myself half dead with relief when a barrage of alerts and texts announce Biden’s win. My friend the ex-Marine sums it all up: “Now we need a deep clean and exorcism of the White House and we’ll pretend it didn’t happen.”
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