The Arrow of Time, Lodged Deep in Our Political Posterior

Photo by Martin Fisch, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

How we humans view politics and how we view time, mortality, and all the mysteries of life and the universe are usually compartmentalized for easy psychological storage, a necessary separation to prevent cross contamination and spoilage. But every once in a while, when those streams cross, good living hell does the language of the commentariat fail to properly explain the ensuing mess.

How we use language to simplify big ideas into small words is a topic the learned and credentialed can spend a lifetime working through. But some of our linguistic clashes in nomenclature are apparent. In politics, right and left are well established terminology to give folks some situational awareness as to where on that spectrum a particular person or thing is falling. Dealing with time however, that nomenclature doesn’t work. If we said yesterday was to the left of tomorrow but tomorrow is to the right of right now, you’d have good lyric, but a bad explainer. Concepts that undergird our understanding of time, like memory and volition, are essential concepts to political narratives and the manipulation thereof but aren’t explicitly discussed, even as ads heavy on nostalgia and brimming with hope and promise dominate advertising.

When we can’t talk about politics within the confines of the vernacular sandbox most of us like to keep politics inside of, things get really messy, really fast. When folks can’t use comfortable language to describe uncomfortable things, grown adults quickly revert, behavior-wise, to toddlers who can’t express themselves properly and have a good, old-fashioned tantrum about it. We humans can do the same thing with understanding things like time and mortality, and have entire ecosystems of philosophers, theologians, and comedians to try and explain such things to us.

I suspect that is why so many folks are looking so foolish to the non-political normies in commenting on this current presidential election. The clear moral unfitness for office of former president Donald Trump and the clear physical unfitness of the current President Joe Biden is apparent taken in a vacuum. But politics doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Donald Trump was elected for mostly being not-Hillary Clinton. Joe Biden was elected because he wasn’t Donald Trump. Donald Trump is leading in polling because not-Trump is no longer overriding the age and health concerns of President Biden combined with the current political lay of the land after 4 years of a Biden presidency.

Since the American electorate is never to blame in the news media – or anywhere else for that matter – for the mess they themselves created, new blameless and neutral nomenclature was applied to the discourse. Almost a full decade of the American electorate working off a base dynamic of “binary choice” and “lesser of two evils” results in the talking heads marveling at why there are so many so-called “double haters” who do not want either candidate.

There is a deep rabbit hole here one can go down of subjects, and systems, and entropy, and environment. But the language usage in political post-presidential debate tells the story. The visceral images of the President of the United States of America unable to speak, think, and function – even if momentarily – destroyed years’ worth of narrative while reinforcing years’ worth of concerns. So visceral, it assists the already short-term memory of Trump days gone by as the bright, shiny object of the Biden age narrative collapse consumes the news media of the moment. The awful but familiar old story of Trump season 9 becomes the accepted norm as the new worrying hotness of Biden’s midseason cliffhanger replaces it.

Political ideology, and buzzword jargon, and carefully crafted policy proposals are the traditional containers for the compartmentalized politics most folks prefer. Maintaining that containment is a billions-of-dollar industry in our socio-political reality. Containment that relies heavily on perception, narrative, and language. Containment that has been shattered in Trump v Biden, Part 2. Trump coverage has gone from “do we take him literally or seriously” to his Gish gallops with a garnish of gauche proclamations not even registering in the news cycle. Politicos, office holders, reporters, commenters, and administration officials who swore up and down Joe Biden was better than ever got caught holding the bag in a way that made even the most shameless professional bag holders momentarily embarrassed and unsure of themselves.

This time, the narratives and spin are not working, the ridiculousness of it all temporarily breaking through the political media matrix. There is no policy or ideology that overrides mortality, the relentless march of time, and the decline of health and abilities in the old that can excuse, explain, or exalt President Joe Biden’s current issues away. There is no policy or ideology that can take the amoral self-centered Trump and shine him up to be anything other than what we not only have well-documented book on, but he himself repeatedly tells us in his actions, in deeds, in all caps. The politics of the moment is pitching the minutia of less bad to a public who clearly sees this is all bad.

When the people are saying “we don’t want either candidate,” believe them, even though it is those same peoples’ fault we have those candidates. Just don’t point out the latter, since the former is meant to be universally and irrefutably exculpatory.

We’ve managed to use representative democracy to create a current paradigm where instead of the future seemingly being wide open and the past closed off, we’ve predestined the opposite, a totally depraved political failure loop even Calvin would marvel at. Somehow, the “representative” portion of our national political psyche decided to run it back and do it again. The universe has profound asymmetry inherent to it, as do humans. Where human behavior stops being asymmetric and starts being hypocritical is nebulous, but that nebula envelops the whole of our politics. We’ve taken the arrow of time, failed to account for windage and curvature of the earth, and in the name of partisan politics shot ourselves right in the ass with it. Embarrassing, yet a remarkable achievement. Well done, us.

Either Donald Trump or President Biden is going to win this election. We will then, either way, have a lame duck president and immediately start the process of the next presidential election cycle. What would be nice is some reflection on how we got here, why two candidates who folks claim in polls they don’t really want still dominated without any real challenge and to therefore be better prepared when we do this again. All those “we don’t want either candidate” folks could have prevented these two candidates, at multiple points in multiple ways, but incrementally accepted, excused, rationalized to the current situation. Analyzing the step-by-step path from the past to the present is some advanced human being-ing that doesn’t make for a great TikTok thought. Such reflection is complicated, messy, and involves honest reflection and accountability that isn’t always easy to understand.

But the demand for the easier-to-understand will be strong; the square peg of dysfunctional political reality jammed through the round hole of the previous compartmentalization, so it all makes comfortable sense without needing too much change. Then the old labels and language will once again make sense, and folks will exhale, and political order will be restored. Reality once more pushed back to the boundaries of the political theater we prefer behind the levees of perception, narrative, and language. The political discourse can once again become linear, right vs left, up is up and down is down. All is well again with most of the sand back in the sandbox. Or at least there will be a supreme, across the board effort to do so.

Wonder how long the new illusion will last then, until reality breaks through again, as it always eventually does. How much of a mess will that be? We probably don’t have words for it. Yet.