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.