The election is finally over and we can all get back to our lives. For me, as an outsider looking in, the most egregious and precarious part of the show was, and is, the fatal divergence between what is and what a large part of the electorate claims to be. You can of course argue that the party of reality denialists lost and all is well, but what does it say about the state of the Union?
It’s a natural part of negotiations, of politics and all human interactions to disagree. But to challenge the most common understandings, the most basic facts of the world around us and to assign whatever meaning you like to the words you use, is a irrevocable breach of trust and respect between human beings, and in my opinion, a symptom of something far worse. This decline of striving for honesty and refusal to accept broadly agreed, well truths, reeks of desperation. And that is never a good thing, in fact, it’s dangerous. This descent did not happen overnight. Profound changes like this never do. They creep up on you, slowly and incrementally. One small utterance at a time. And remember, all to many of these are carefully premeditated and made by choice.
When The Onion first published this brilliant piece of satire, I laughed harder and harder for every paragraph I read. When reading it now, after all is done but perhaps not said, somehow what I earlier thought hilariously funny, now feels ominous. The reason is simple. The very thing that’s being so expertly lampooned, suddenly looks too close to the very thing it’s making fun of, to be funny.
“CHARLOTTE, NC—With the savage roar of the heathen Democratic horde rising all around him, President Barack Obama delivered an incendiary speech to close his party’s national convention Thursday night, commanding the ultraprogressive minions in attendance to help him “destroy Jesus and usher in a new age of liberal darkness that shall reign o’er the earth for a thousand years.”
The thunderous 45-minute address—during which the president argued for a second term so that he could “finally kill Jesus once and for all, as well as all those who worship him”—was well received by the frenzied, wild-eyed audience, whose piercing chants of “Four more years!” and “Slaughter the believers!” echoed throughout the Time Warner Cable Arena.”