This report comes to you live from an American on the other side of the world.
I had been nervous about the election for a long time because, despite the polling and Nate Silver and the general incompetence of the Romney campaign, I was afraid that Obama would lose. I really was. I had superstitious reasons for feeling this way. You see, I wasn’t born on the fourth of July, I’m not a yankee doodle dandy, but I was born on the sixth of November, and that means that every once in awhile election day falls on my birthday. The last time it happened was in the year 2000, on the day America somehow found itself with George W. Bush as president. In a solipsistic way a part of me really believed that I was to blame for this disaster, and that the heavily grinding gears of time, the beating wings of thousands of butterflies, had sufficiently fanned the winds of fate to doom America to eight years of catastrophe. Like a bellows to a roaring furnace. And now it would happen again. My birthday would push each wing and gear a little harder in the wrong direction, just barely tipping the balance…
