There’s nothing more boring than people talking about their dreams. I’ve got to talk about this one, though, because it’s apparently not just mine. Last night, I dreamed that the Earth was about to get hit by a meteor big enough to cause human extinction. I had a line on a seat on a spaceship offworld, but I’d missed the bus to get to the launch and I wasn’t sure I could make it in time by cab.
I woke up before the meteor hit, so I never got to find out whether I made it or not. That’s not always the way these dreams go: so far, I’m about 50/50 on catching the spaceship. The other half of the time, I just get blown up along with everyone else.
Is this a collective dream? At least it’s a political one. I always have it when I’ve been paying too much attention to elections. One time, my ride on the spaceship was supposed to be courtesy of a community organizer I knew. Instead, he showed up with a rowboat. That was one of the dreams where I got blown up.
Is it a collective dream? Yes, to judge from the bumper stickers that were everywhere during the last presidential election: “Giant Meteor 2016.” Extinction is better than politics. That’s not exactly a tongue-in-cheek sentiment, especially if you think that politics is maybe now just a longer, more terrifying route to extinction anyway.
I don’t think we’re going to see those stickers get updated for 2020, even if Biden wins the Democratic nomination. Politics is serious now; we grew up somehow in the last four years, and we don’t treat Trump like a joke anymore. The most important thing is beating him.
This is actually a dangerous attitude, though – not taking politics seriously, which is extremely appropriate, but extending that seriousness uncritically to the presidential contenders. The fact that we’re ready to do that makes us smell desperate, which is what got desperate grifters like Seth Moulton to jump in the water. Campaigns that we’d otherwise instantly dismiss as shameful vanity projects now advance, under the cover of seriousnesss, onto the national stage. Pete Buttigieg ought to be starring in a Little Rascals reboot; instead, he’s polling a bit shy of ten percent.
Buttigieg won’t win, but likely as not the end of the primary process will spit out a candidate as vain and empty as he is – someone like Biden, who won’t do a damn thing to roll back Trump’s most vile policies but who’ll make us feel better about them by not talking like a brain-damaged Nazi. You can bet Biden isn’t going to abolish ICE; he’ll just make us forget that we’re running concentration camps for children.
Is that “seriousness?” No, it’s seriousness as performance, both on Biden’s part and ours. In a Trump/Biden race, we’ll be asked to make a choice between putting a smily face on fascism or leaving the mask off. If we pretend that’s a real choice, then that’s the choice we’ll keep getting sold for the foreseeable future.
I’d want Giant Meteor to be running in that race. Hell, I want Giant Meteor to be running in the Democratic primary. New debate rule: any candidate who can’t beat mass extinction in all the national and state polls doesn’t make it onto the stage. If Giant Meteor wins, NASA has to go find an appropriately-sized rock and smash it into the Earth. If it loses, put it back in the next presidential election cycle. We should always get the chance to choose the fast route to oblivion, just so we don’t take the slow one by accident.