Turn Back the Time

Remember when you turned back your clocks recently? You didn't realize you were turning them back to 1936, did you?

Aaaaaaanyway....

Trump is so watchable – that’s surely something his supporters and detractors can agree on. It’s not the hair, it’s not the extremist rhetoric, it’s the sheer magnetism of his self-satisfaction. The density of his self-joy is so great it drags your eyes towards it like galactic debris to a black hole. When he puts on a statesmanlike face, you just know his inner monologue is delightedly singing “My amazing face looks so statesmanlike right now!”

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If politics were just a reality TV show (rather than mainly a reality TV show), Trump would never get voted out.

  David Mitchell

Yeah, that's a scary thought. However, if you look closely, you'll notice that we have indeed been heading toward this moment when the ultimate "reality star" took the largest stage on the planet. We've been dumbing ourselves down with reality TV for a long time. People have been discussing TV show plots as though they were discussing people they actually know at their places of employment for decades, and in the last few of those decades, every presidential candidate has made his or her way onto TV variety or talk shows.

Trump’s win hit me in several ways. First, it denied me his defeat scene. I wanted to see that. His character seemed designed expressly for that sort of comeuppance, as surely as the diner redneck in Superman II. I was desperate to see him spun round on his bar stool, all scared. It really feels like a missed opportunity, for him as much as everyone else.

Second, it robbed me of a comforting certainty: he can’t win – he’s too awful.

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And third: I’ve started to look on the bright side and it makes me despise myself. [...] A mixture of apathy and fear-avoidance extorts a sickly optimism from my brain.

Maybe he didn’t mean what he said; maybe the Republican party will restrain him; politicians never get much done anyway; maybe it’ll all be fine.

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Things don’t always get better over time. But I’m grateful to have lived through an era when it was still widely assumed that they did.