I spend a considerable amount of time wondering how we got here. Here in a world we couldn’t have anticipated.
We’ve recently experienced such swift reversals of political and social advancements that we seem to be constantly left standing slack-jawed, bewildered by how fragile progress can be. Led by a small group of adulterated politicians, these about-faces reflect only the will of minute fringe groups. And that makes the past 18 months seem even more surreal.
As I contemplate how we got to this point, caring for my two small children, I often consider the idea of a lineage – generational evolutions that mutate that which was once noble into something now selfish, harmful, and angry.
This is an attempt to work backward from the angry, insecure white males leading our current political turmoil, to consider what must have occurred in order for us now to suffer through the age of politicians like Mitch McConnell.
In our earliest generations, Americans came from adventurous, self-confident stock like Indiana Jones and Maude. That’s why George Washington was the way he was. Crossed with some woman lost to history, Washington’s mythical greatness yielded the empathetic vision of masculinity that was Thomas Magnum, P.I.
But here’s where the difficulties began for America.
Magnum was too often guided by lust, a pretty woman in distress (Snow White’s Queen) was his weakness. Their offspring, Leona Helmsley, was an errant child, guided by greed and supported by the wealth of earlier generations. She valued only that which she could control – the ever-interchangeable Mr. Potato Head. Together, they produced the follicularly-challenged megalomaniac of It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Potter. This man had no morals, attempting to dismantle Bedford Falls as he did, and enjoyed only the company of cold-blooded individuals like himself. Therefore, it’s plausible that he and an alligator merged and produced another city-destroying monster, Godzilla.
By this point the intelligence of our family has been irrefutably compromised. We now have a creature with a literal “lizard brain” (a colloquialism for the limbic system of the brain, implicated as the seat of emotion, addiction, mood, and lots of other mental and emotional processes… because the limbic system is about all a lizard has for brain function). Godzilla – with his anger issues, willingness to destroy entire cities, and inability to consider logic – finds The General Lee (the car from The Dukes of Hazzard) shiny enough for his purposes, and the love-child of this monster and a slightly racist symbol of southern defiance is none other than Kentucky’s own Mitch McConnell.
At this point McConnell seems to have reached an evolutionary benchmark – he’s able to reproduce other angry white men asexually.
It’s a frightening prospect, but that’s the story of how we got here.
