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The 2020 Election Isn’t About Idealism. It’s About Survival

It was a slow news weekend in “real” America. A livestreamer was beaten at a Proud Boy rally in Portland, and in Washington, D.C., talk was of the Return, meaning one of the two major prayer marches on the National Mall. If you love God and Donald Trump and fear antifa, the 2020 takeaway is much the same as that recently delivered by James E. “Trey” Trainor III, Trump’s Federal Election Commission chair: “spiritual war.” With real-world weapons. On Saturday, Q—the mysterious “patriot” who may be America’s most-studied news source—topped off the day’s “drops” with a link to a murky green video of military helicopters “[lighting] up the night.” No comment was necessary. Visions of violence are the new lingua franca.

Then there were the other returns. Trump’s taxes were finally laid out in an exposé in the New York Times. The report feels like a time capsule from another America, one that began with the 1973 revelation that Richard Nixon had paid only $792 in federal income taxes in 1970. That led to the custom of candidates disclosing their tax returns, a “tradition” that lasted until four years ago when Trump simply did not. But now we know what Trump was hiding: $750 in federal taxes. He beat the crook by $42. Nixon’s taxes were a scandal, and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned as he pleaded no contest to tax evasion. In 2020, in the GIF’d words of actor James Woods, the Trump era’s right-wing Reinhold Niebuhr (with 2.6 million Twitter followers, today’s measure of moral authority), “NOBODY CARES.

For all practical purposes, Woods is right. The hope that deliverance from Trump’s no-longer-creeping authoritarianism will come by way of a scoop, a tape, or a leak is banal. But then, hope of that sort was always banal. Real hope isn’t what we feel when reason is on the table, when logic can be expected to win the day. Real hope, deep hope, is the twin of despair. It’s what we turn to when all else has failed, when we know that our greatest efforts may not be enough. Maybe the number that mattered most from the recent news, 750 divided by 205,000, times any other digit you care to pluck from the headlines, was 12: the age of a rosy-cheeked girl with Orphan Annie hair named Elizabeth McNew, who died last week of COVID-19. No news will save her.

The 2020 election is—best-case scenario—a Hodor election. That is, the gentle giant of Game of Thrones, the prince-in-exile’s guardian who carries the paralyzed boy and responds to all questions with only his name, Hodor. “Hodor,” we eventually learn, is short for “hold the door,” an imperative given him as a youth as a mnemonic until it came time to do just that, against a demon horde while his young charge escapes. That may be as much as we can do. For many, this election isn’t going to be about choosing a leader we love. The opportunity that may be afforded us is to hold the door, to hold back the greater nightmare, just long enough for the next generation to get away so that they might someday try for something better.

Hodor is also a time capsule from 2016, the year of his television demise, when even President Barack Obama marked his passing, half-joking but more-than-half in recognition of just how sad a scene it was. Hodor is a message from the recent but distant past to those who can’t or won’t bring themselves to vote for Joe Biden, and to those who will, but who believe that doing so—casting their ballot and hoping for the best—will be enough. Both sentiments are understandable, rooted in frustration with weak-tea liberalism and the glaring limits of electoral politics in the U.S., and the desire to check out, to retreat. Such views do not merit the shaming they elicit on Twitter. Conscience matters, and we all do what we’re able to. 

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