Wind swept New Hampshire

Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle 10.24.12

Yeah, I know, two posts in one day. This man must have too much time on his hands, or he is really gone around the bend.

A little of both.
They sent us home from work. The governor of New Hampshire told everyone to get off  the roads by 3 PM. Apparently not even health workers were exempt--word came down from the hospital, get out.

There's a big storm blowing up the East Coast and into the heartland Midwest. It's howling and it's threatening.  My father called that kind of thing, "Pathetic fallacy" which is what the storm in King Lear is,  when it reflects the storm in the king's mind. 

And now we have the end of this election approaching and there is a big storm blowing.  It's shaking the windows and rattling the walls,  as the new bard (Dylan) would say. 

And it all seems pretty appropriate somehow. Obama came in to office and just before he could be sworn in the storm hit.  He took office as 2 1/2 million jobs were lost in a year, the stock market collapsed, and along with it the prospects for retirement for many; a tsunami of  foreclosures swept over the land ; evictions exploded; General Motors and Chrysler careened toward the financial brink; banks went up in flames, even the venerable  Lehman Brothers; a Great Depression loomed like a brick wall toward which the entire country was hurtling and Obama had to steer this boat which could not be turned on dime. And that was just the home front: In Iraq things were going from bad to worse, and we still hadn't found Osma Bin Laden, and Afghanistan, which had once been conquered, was now fighting us like the Viet Cong, from behind rocks and crevices. Pakistan was no help, and in fact, turned out to be hiding Bin Laden.

As the editors of the New Yorker (from which the above paragraph is drawn) noted, the Onion 's headline was "Black Man Given Nation's Worse Job."

Or, as Maud would remind us, the best description was that Mr. Obama had been handed a "shit sandwich."

And it all raged and raged and the captain lashed himself to the mast and did not abandon ship.  He guided us through that storm. And today's storm somehow reminds me, not of Katrina, with the What Me Worry boy himself saying "Great Job, Brownie," but of the storm which swept the nation at the beginning of Mr. Obama's term, and now as we come full cycle, another storm. 

Let us hope, in Lincoln's words, "This, too, shall pass." 
And let us hope the captain will be  given his due.