Extreme Metaphor: US Election Edition

Voting itself is a metaphor – I’m talking about the big one, the prezzie election held every four years.  (Local elections don’t dip their toes into metaphor to such a colossal extent.)  To start, e.g., Trump’s phrase “Make America Great Again” flies in the face of what the Presidential Election (PE) stands for: the election itself stands for greatness.  Voting stands for democracy since just about everyone gets to do it.  How dare you Donald for suggesting a return to greatness!  Indeed, Hillary has tapped into this narrative saying she thinks America is already great: greatness embodied by the election itself.

But let’s take a step back.  Let’s ignore the differences between the two.  In this anno domini 2016 let’s meld the candidates together and then we can look at the conditions that permit them to be there, the conditions that permit them to be there but are not discussed. 

In effect, what are the candidates metaphors for?

First and foremost they represent the idea that one man or woman can fix things.  The office of the President is sacrosanct.  The President is the leader of the free world, the captain of the great and gleaming ship that is America, the States so painfully and exquisitely United. 

The President is a fixed star.

And what about America rotates around this fixed point?  The idea that the United States is the savior of the world, no less.  To me this is the toughest code to crack: things have changed but we pretend to live in an unchanged world.  It ain’t the years after WWII.  A blind eye may so easily be turned to the US’s role in the world.  What am I talking about?  I’m simply talking about selling ones soul.  It is in our faces every day (well at least on page 2 or 3 of the newspaper, maybe at the bottom of the front page): our involvement in the Middle East.  Our involvement in Central America.  Our 800 bases outside of the United States.  The story seems so old by now, so banal.  “Yeah, we’ve propped up third world dictators but that’s how the game is played.”  “We need to support our allies overseas.”  Do people think about our past?  Do people think about our present?  That we are still doing shit like that today? 

I feel like there is a moral rule that I never learned and that rule is: you can do bad shit as long as you ignore the fact that you do it.  Done.  No biggie.  We support Saudi Arabia for oil interests, duh – but also for stability in the Middle East.  Get it? 

And this is not to be talked about in the debates.  And this will not come to a referendum vote come November.

It’s got to be something in the DNA of America itself.  Keep moving west and don’t look back.  Or things are so awesome in day-to-day life here that it is just too easy and convenient to ignore – or turn that blind eye towards – the fucked up stuff.

And that is the level that the candidates for President are approached on: they represent us and we are much more concerned with salacious sex-style scandals than the soul of America gliding inexorably down the halls of hell.

A vindication of the system

Recently the journalist/author Russ Baker was on the Tim Dillon is Going to Hell for a fun and insightful discussion.  The conversation focused on things that influence our government “behind the scenes”, so to speak.  Russ broke down historical information to the hosts, Tim and Matt, some information that has been known and some that has come to light recently.  One particular intelligence agency looms particularly large and the dad of the President during 9/11 was the head of it for a year (trying to be oblique).

Russ provided fodder for my perhaps Snarxist sensibilities – information that is not widely known or particularly cared about, but that is important.  Others pigeonhole me into being ironic because of what is permissible to talk about.  And this election cycle what can and cannot be discussed is revealing.  And goddam frustrating.

In the TDGH interview Tim asked if he gets annoyed when people get really worked up about what is presented in the dominant narrative: like the above-board discussion of the merits and demerits of the two (only two!) candidates.  Russ:

“This is a continuation of the distraction of the public from what actually matters and from what actually affects them.  They don’t really understand the extent to which this is some sort of entertainment, a spectacle, bread and circuses.  Yes these things matter in certain ways on certain levels but the fact of the matter is it doesn’t matter if it’s Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump: they would never be allowed to deviate substantively from the course of American policy over the biggest issues affecting the wealthiest people.  You’re talking about resource extraction, you’re talking about the constant use of the military to control much of the world, you’re talking about the dominance of the financial sector – these things are inviolable.  Where they differ is at least in the way they talk about hot button issues that get people riled up.  But there are even limits to what they can do in those areas.  Yes it’s important but should it suck all the air out of the room and make us so exhausted that come November we stop paying attention right when the real work begins?  No.”

Look, I’ve covered the idea of voting before.  And I agree that at the local level issues are clearer and change may be easier to institute.  The national elections are something else – a mass ritual, really.  The presidential election is a sanctioned event that allows each and every one to have their say – at least have their say about what is printed in mainstream newspapers.  Now is the time to express your feelings as long as it falls within the narrow purview permitted by the media and permitted by the intellect of your fellow fuckwit citizens.

What?  You think you’re better than voting?  How else are you going to express yourself?  This is it.  You get this one chance so you better fucking get involved.  How – well creepy is the word that first comes to mind – how creepy that Chris Wallace implored the TV/Web audience to vote.  I’m sorry but it came off as cajoling, manipulative:

Now the decision is up to you. While millions have already voted, election day, November 8, is just 20 days away. One thing everyone here can agree on is we hope you will go vote. It is one of the honors and obligations of living in this great country. Thank you and good night. 

By voting you say you approve of the system even if your morals have been fit into the Procrustean bed of “the lesser of two evils.”  I’ll just continue to shake my head and wonder why the world I live in is so different than the world that it is embodied by the debates and politics and people’s attitudes to this bizarre (but not if you understand it goddamit!) system/pageantry of politics.  To let Tim Dillon conclude (min 35): “By the way all you people that are going to be dancing and celebrating a Hillary Clinton victory: you are celebrating a vindication of the system, that’s it.”

Feeling numbers (Our too-Roman numerals)

The facts – as they pertain to our nation and its economy – stream fast in front of us.  A relentless torrent of good facts.  Knowledge, numbers and trends.  They say that some may see the stats of a baseball game and see the game played in their mind’s eye. The numbers tell the story.

And it is great that these facts are so readily at hand.  I mean, we don’t live in a totalitarian society, where one may not even have access to the numbers.  Do we take this for granted, this wonderful availability of tell-tale numbers?

E.g.: we have Piketty and his work.  Important numbers.  At what point do the numbers make one act?  What is the number in any given category that makes one go forth into the street with revolutionary purpose and fervor?  Piketty provides some eye-openers – and he was widely reported on.

Ah, the numbers must be felt.  The number describing inequality comes second to the lived experience of inequality.  Yet ghettoized in our “media enclaves and technological enclaves and geographical enclaves” (minute 55) our reactions are isolated, pigeonholed.  If we could read the common language of numbers we could perhaps overcome our insular states and realize our common potential.  In the end it seems another story of hope dashed by the unfelt façade of the too-Roman numerals.

Class resentment: debate edition

A provocation offered by our favorite Archdruid:

“[T]he affluent classes from which the leadership of the liberal movement is drawn, and which set the tone for the movement as a whole, benefit directly from the collapse in wages that has partly been caused by mass illegal immigration, since that decrease in wages has yielded lower prices for the goods and services they buy and higher profits for the companies for which many of them work, and whose stocks many of them own.”

Sacred cows, things tough to talk about.  He has his arguments for the idea that an influx of more folks corresponds with depressed wages, an idea of whose mechanisms I’ll leave alone.

But the idea that one class might benefit from the immiseration of another – what a powerful idea. This is a true zero-sum outlook.  Is that what is going on?  Are some jobs created by offshoring other ones?  Perhaps the jobs held by a more upper-middle class group?  So that lower-wages are experienced by what we would call a lower class?

And let’s map this onto the current (2016) national election (even though I continuously and, obviously, ineffectually swear off thinking about or spending any amount of effort on).  Do the candidates bases – the core group/demographic that supports each of the two candidates – match up with the two participants in a zero-sum game mentioned above?  I think this makes things just that much spicier.

Two classes that are not simply at odds with each other when it comes to, say, values but whose very existences rely one on the other.  A negative relationship that isn’t broached publically.  Not talked about in the debate.  A clear source of resentment that goes on not being expressed.  What benefits the elite impoverishes the poor.  The elite being those with degrees who have jobs that require degrees and the poor being those with zero post-high school education not making much money if not any at all.

How embarrassing!  Embarrassing?  Is that the right word?  That sounds weird but, man, it is an awkward relationship.  That link and the link doesn’t get talked about.  Not just free agents pursuing life in different but still unencumbered ways.  No.  What is going on in this case is an elite, the upper-middle class being in a position of power, holding sway over an underclass.  The two groups come to the table as un-equals.   But, as though some fairytale curse had been cast, they find themselves incapable of putting words to this idea.

But beyond the resort to storytime curses there are real structures and concept to apply here.  Resentment was mentioned above and perhaps that is a good way to look at how poor sees rich – and, heck, even how rich sees poor.  The sense of injustice that the word resentment carries with it is easy to see from the perspective of the poor.  What a shitty relationship to be in, being the one who has been wronged!  And those that wronged you have more power.  But flip the script and think of the awkwardness the rich must feel – I’m being serious.  They are in the position of feeling like their well-off existences is the product of greed – and then they have to (maybe occasionally) rub shoulders with those that they’ve wronged.  They must be all like, “Umm, sorry?  Suckers? . . .  I stole it fair and square.  You don’t know what it’s like”. 

So, for the elections . . . bring on more spectacle!