PIRANHAS

Hong Kong 1950s

Other journalists who wrote about some of the same areas as he did, Islamic fundamentalism, national security, received conciliatory visits from the authorities; who would advise them on safety procedures and how best to proceed. He got harassed, year in and year out, month in and month out. Tormented, bullied, ridiculed. 

That was the way of the grinding machinery that was Australian governance.

Piranhas, flash crowds of piranhas, had circled through the invisible air, feeding their careers and determined to torment, because, as someone masquerading as a friend had said to him only a few days before, "you're just one person". 

And Just One Person can be destroyed, is vulnerable, gets lonely, is beset by frailty.

And so the predators came out to play.

Be careful what you pray for, he warned them, as the bullies circled.


THE BIGGER STORY:

It’s 3:30 a.m. in the newsroom, and we’re in a state of shock. Donald J. Trump, against what we thought were all odds, collected swing state after swing state after swing state. Hillary Clinton has conceded the race. Mr. Trump has won.
So, what just happened? “We don’t know what happened, because the tools that we would normally use to help us assess what happened failed,” Ms. Haberman says. “The polling on both sides was wrong.”
Mr. Rutenberg had just finished writing about how the media had missed Mr. Trump’s wide appeal, and what that misfire says about journalists’ flawed understanding of major swaths of our country. “What we now know is that a huge part of the country is far more upset about the ills that he was pointing to and promising to fix than any of the flaws that we were pointing out about him as a candidate,” Mr. Rutenberg says on the show.
“I would say this is a failure of expertise on the order of the fall of the Soviet Union or the Vietnam War,” Mr. Confessore says. “What we are seeing is in part a revolt of the country that people had written off as the country of the past, against the country that most people thought they were living in: a country of the future, of a multicultural future, of a globalized world. This was a revolt of people who did not feel vested in that future America.”

WASHINGTON — President Obama and Donald J. Trump made a public show on Thursday of putting their bitter differences aside after a stunning election upset. The Oval Office meeting brought together a president who has darkly warned that Mr. Trump could not be trusted with the nuclear codes and a successor who rose to political prominence questioning Mr. Obama’s birthplace and legitimacy.
“I want to emphasize to you, Mr. President-elect, that we now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed, then the country succeeds,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Trump as the two sat side-by-side after the roughly 90-minute meeting. The president called the session “excellent” and wide-ranging.
It was an extraordinary show of cordiality and respect between two men who have been political enemies and are stylistic opposites — Mr. Trump a brash real estate executive and reality television star whose campaign was defined in opposition to the sitting president, and Mr. Obama, a cool-tempered intellectual who has pressed a progressive agenda in office.

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