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A chance encounter at the buffet made me wonder if instead of nodding and smiling I should be passionately disagreeing
I was in a hotel in a rural part of northern California, asking a man at the breakfast buffet what he thought of Barack Obama. Up to that point, we had been talking, affably, about drug addiction, paganism and the likelihood of a volcano in the area blowing any time soon, before moving on to his enthusiasm for Donald Trump. Now he looked at me suspiciously. The question, he knew, contained an accusation within it, as did my follow-up about Hillary Clinton. “I would love to see a female – a black female! – be president,” he said carefully. “Just not her.”
I felt some sympathy for the guy in the hotel, and then – a sign of the times – wondered if this amounted to collaboration Continue reading...