After the 2016 election, I started re-watching The West Wing.* I found it very soothing to mentally remove myself to a world with a kind, intelligent president who is more interested in doing the right thing than in politics or optics or winning. And a world where the Republicans are mostly honest and polite, and occasionally agree with the Democrats about things, or cross party lines to Do the Right Thing. And where Democrats have, like, principles, and act on them.
Except, my suspension of disbelief kept getting un-suspended by plot points or throwaway comments that reminded me how much society has changed since the turn of the century.** Frequent storylines involve really blatant, unapologetic sexism and racism and antisemitism and homophobia, not necessarily as any actions or events, but just as an assumed background. Even instances that are completely overt and blatant just slide by- people maybe get irritated/offended/hurt, but they don't go straight to HR. Mostly they are barely noticed (by the characters. I noticed them: they interrupted my escapism!). And the underlying assumptions about what is politically feasible, and what the optics should be, and how society in general will react to something, are all just there, never mentioned or complained about or acknowledged. You know, like underlying assumptions tend to be.
The underlying assumptions have shifted dramatically for the better, now. Obviously we still have sexism and racism and antisemitism and homophobia, but they don't look the same. Society frowns upon them, and also upon other isms that barely even had names in the 90s. They don't glide by unnoticed anymore. Sometimes this results in violence, sometimes it gets us new laws protecting people, sometimes it gets us an insane "populist" president. It's like that situation with the eggs and the omelet, only it isn't really because people are being injured and killed, which is much more traumatic and horrible and preventable than breaking eggs, and I would be a huge jerk if I thought that were actually a reasonable metaphorical response. Eggs and trauma aside, though, there is a bright silver lining to all the dystopian mayhem, which is that I really think it is a result of underlying assumptions getting better. The tide has turned and some people really, really don't want it to. They're behaving badly, and making everyone else miserable in the process, but the tide don't care.
The people who liked the previous underlying assumptions, and don't want the new ones, are scared and angry. They liked their positions in the society based on the old assumptions, and they (correctly) think their positions in the new one will be on a lower rung of the ladder. It doesn't matter where they were on the old ladder, they'll be down a few rungs on the new one while all the people who were stuck at the bottom before get new, higher, rungs. (This metaphor is entertaining me a lot. I'm imagining literal ladders, and people gripping rungs, and falling off. I could take this metaphor a long, long way, baby.)
Back to my show: watching the West Wing turned out to be less of an escapist fantasy and more of an encouragement. All these guys clutching their rungs so fiercely are going to die off eventually, and the standing room on the old underlying assumptions is going to get smaller and smaller, and there's nothing they can do about that. They can't make the assumptions go back, and they're mad about that too. They can throw a bunch of tantrums about how mad they are, and work as hard as they can to keep their old ladders and save their old underlying assumptions and build a wall to keep the tide out, but they're going to lose.
(The problem is they very much can destroy the planet in the futile struggle against the future, and then there will be no underlying assumptions or eggs or ladders or ridiculous metaphors*** for anyone. So that's a pretty big caveat that I prefer to ignore.)
The world is not that terrible! Our current government is not a sign of national regression! The bad guys may
seem like they're winning, but it's only temporary! Hooray!
*This was another event that revealed a personal preference of mine to be an extreme outlier. Every single person I told this to responded with some version of "oh my god, how can you stand it, it's way too soon." I don't care! One of the new assumptions is that everybody's mileage may vary, n'est pas? Leave me alone with my pretend president!
**It is very entertaining to say this and mean "when I was in college".
***It didn't start out this way, but about halfway through I started consciously mixing as many metaphors as I could think of into this post. I'm pretty pleased with the result.
