Quotes for the week: Election? Was there some kind of election? I was mostly concerned to see if my DVR recorded the final week of MasterChef

"I am encouraged to go on."
--Harold Ross (seen here in 1927), who founded the The New Yorker in 1925--a message he left occasionally for E. B. White in the magazine's struggling early years

"Ah! ah! ah! My gaiety is coming back to me." [Sorry, I don't have the mental agility to come up with a better way to translate the French "gaiete"--it is the word that Figaro means, he just doesn't mean that]
--Figaro, in the monologue that opens Act IV of Beaumarchais's L'autre Tartufe, ou La mere coupable (The Other Tartufe, or The Guilty Mother)

Some years ago on Election Day I rode down in an elevator with a guy who explained to the friend or colleague he was riding with that he had developed the habit of scheduling trips so that he was always departing for somewhere on Election Day. The logic struck everyone in the elevator as unimpeachable: If things go well electionwise, great; if not, you're off to somewhere else, with your mind forced to focus on other things.

This year, totally unintentionally, I turned into that guy. Having put off for way too many months a trip that had to be undertaken to deal with stark family realities, I finally couldn't put it off any longer, and on the spur of the moment went ahead and booked my flights. When the dust settled, I realized I had scheduled myself to catch a 7am flight on Wednesday, the morning after the election--or, looked at another way, way late in the night of election-result-counting.

The trip got off to a suitably strange start. I never did go to bed Tuesday night; since I had to leave by about 4:30am, I kind of didn't dare. I knew I would have been wide awake in bed till about 4 and then dropped into a deep, plane-missing slumber. So I stayed up with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann (left, who did a terrific job) and Chris Matthews (who did a mostl ypretty good job, up to his snotty and ungracious parting shot at Olbermann--could it somehow have been meant as some kind of "straight-shooting" complimen?), making periodic trips down to the basement laundry room. (That's me popping down to the laundry room, not Keith and Chris.)

By the time I headed out into the dark of morning, in a steady rain, the election results were looking awfully good: The Democratic rout in the House was established, and with Claire McCaskill already claiming victory in Missouri, assuming the Democratic leads held in Montana and Virginia, the Senate too would switch to Democratic control. There would be no more information till I got to Florida. At 5am I was huddled against the rain in a bus shelter on 125th Street waiting for the M60 bus to the airport; eventually the damned bus came, and the hardest part of the trip was accomplished.

By the time I turned the TV on in Florida, Jon Tester had already claimed victory in Montana. Shortly thereafter, MSNBC (which had gotten me through the night pretty nicely) reported that the AP was calling Virginia for Jim Webb. A commentator pointed out that Democrats seemed to have learned a lesson from the Florida Follies of 2000. Screw the polite old tradition of a candidate waiting for the opponent to concede before claiming victory. Go ahead and tell the world you've won, then let the other side prove you're wrong.

I confess that the closer we got to the election, the scareder I got. As polls started closing Tueday evening, I was in a state of terror. Part of me was so prepared to believe that Karl Rove could pull this one out of his lard-ass. The narrowing in the polls over the weekend pointed that way. The closer the time came, the more I was grateful to have that 7am flight. But then the early results from the Northeast were encouraging, and my stomach started to unclench.

The quotes I've offered above are really for that day, and the days following. Oh sure, there are horrific struggles ahead. After all, all the problems that existed before the forces of darkness installed Chimpy the Prez in the White House, there was a healthy administration's worth of problems to deal with. Now we have to deal with all those problems as made infinitely worse by a diseased and incompetent administration, plus all the problems that have arisen since, many of them created or at least raised to critical proportion by that same administration. And yes, there is the smarmy smile on the creepy puss of Master Rahm Emanuel and his Senate counterpart Chuck Schumer, and the nation's general habit of learning the wrong lessons from elections.

But I think we can at least allow ourselves a deep breath.

The Ross quote comes from James Thurber's memoir, The Years with Ross. Ross himself was a one-of-a-kind phenomenon: a Colorado-born hayseed with minimal publishing experience who pretty much out of nowhere invented The New Yorker i 1925. Those early years were a huge struggle, and according to Thurber Ross developed a singular system for communicating with his invaluable and singularly trusted aide, E. B. White: by leaving messages in his typewriter. While the messages were more likely to lean in the direction of "God, how I pity me," on rare occasions some unspecified event or development might prompt the spontaneous outburst of optimism cited above.

And then there is Figaro, the jack of all trades and incurable wit around whom Beaumarchais [right] built three plays. The Other Tartufe, or The Guilty Mother. Unlike the first two, the frothy Barber of Seville and the more darkly comic Marriage of Figaro (fine plays in their own right which became canonical in the operatic renderings of Rossini and Mozart, respectively), La mere coupable isn't a comedy. It's more of a nightmare heading into tragedy.

It seemed, at the end of The Marriage of Figaro, as if the household of Count Almaviva had survived all the crises besetting it, and clear sailing lay ahead. Alas, no such luck. Over time, the already-misery-beset household falls under the spell of a new Tartufe, in the tradition of Moliere's religious hypocrite who with fake piety essentially enslaved a household for his personal enrichment and power. Beaumarchais's Tartufe, Monsieur Begearss, bamboozles everyone except Figaro, who finds himself fighting a lone war--and one casualty has been his celebrated good humor and wit.

As Act IV begins, Figaro has finally seen how the monstrous Begearss can be brought down, and for the first time in a long while, he laughs. Then he says, well, you know.

I do have a couple of tales to tell from the Land of the Other Bush. (Did you hear that Governor Jeb pronounced the 18,000 or so "undervotes" in the Sarasota voting to replace Katherine Harris in Congress--as if anyone could truly replace our Kate--"unusual"?) But that will wait. First I have to finish watching MasterChef.