from Jürgen Streeck
Email from our friend and colleague Jürgen Streeck (Austin, Texas)
Dear all,
It's a grey day in Austin. There are low clouds over the city, it got cold yesterday, and it's drizzling incessantly. The campus is empty, and all you see in this young and optimistic (and today yawningly empty) city are grey faces, except for a few smiling white women. Groups of students stand around crying on the empty campus, and many are scared. More than half of my graduate seminar has called in sick and I have cancelled it. My German-Swiss friend Peter and I were supposed to go to the Democratic Party's big victory party at the Driskill Hotel, but we stayed home because of the pouring rain-and then because of the results coming in. Peter went home crying at ten.
My reaction was more paradoxical, which I don't quite understand myself. With grim cynicism and almost a little amusement, I thought, with my offspring and my students in front of me: you know where you stand and what you have to do. Don't panic now. As luck would have it, my big hip-hop lecture tomorrow, in which there are many black and Latino students, but certainly also Trump voters, racism and Black Lives Matter are on the programme. That's where calm is called for on my part, it has to come from somewhere. (I'm sure this is just the first Kübler-Ross stage, that of denial). In the end, I was not surprised by the election result: there could be no doubt about the racism of many white Americans, nor about that of the Republican Party, and Hillary Clinton's self-assurance that she is entitled to this office has long been a pain in the arse. She lost the election, as I'm sure you've all read, with African-Americans and Latinos, who she also thought she was somehow entitled to (even though her husband has put more black men in jail than anyone before him). Trump ultimately only got one per cent more white votes than Romney, so nothing new on that front. More like he did pretty well among black and Latino men too.
So you switch the radio from KUT, the news station, to the classical station, dress warmly, stay at home (where, fittingly, the internet has been down since election day) and hope to spread and find all the more warmth in your own neighbourhood. But when you think about the rabble that Trump will surround himself with in his administration, the fact that he can rule through, and then about climate change, you won't want to stay there for too long. But who knows: the truth is that the least that will change is our comfortable and secure situation, especially with two homelands and two passports. But it's a pity that the visitors from the old homeland will once again be absent...
Give us a hug and stay on the ball,
Jürgen
Jürgen Streeck, Dr phil., is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Contact: