Back a couple centuries ago in the 1980s there was an Orville Redenbacher popcorn commercial with a World Series baseball theme where Orville’s wife made a play on words saying to her husband who was glued to the TV day in day out watching the games: “Oh, Orville, don’t take the world serious …”
I started to run with this theme in my last blog and somehow the whole thing morphed into a riff about furry blue aliens in space eating popcorn watching the US political race because it was post presidential debate #2 and there was still one more to endure and all these women were coming forward to talk about Trump molesting them physically and verbally and all my own female indignation buttons were getting triggered and I spent hours everyday, glued to the pages of the political blog site Daily KOS.
I wasn’t prepared to take my own advice … I couldn’t even manage to give it. Now—ha! Now, post debate #3, I’m ready to lighten up.
Hopefully things have gotten as bad as they’re gonna get. It’s a lot to swallow, but I’ve finally accepted that at least a third of America is still stubbornly clinging to misogyny, bigotry, Islamaphobia, rifles, ignorance, hatred and fear.
I’ve accepted that millions of men and women will follow the prattling of a raging egomaniac with limited intelligence, no plans, no knowledge, no experience, no ethics, no morals, no real business sense, no responsibility, no communication skills, no relationships skills, no compassion and no interest in developing any of these attributes. These people love The Donald and will follow him no matter what—even over a cliff—because he’s in a position to publicly bluster and incite and point fingers and lay blame on all the things they hate and fear and blame.
I understand my fellow brother and sister Americans are at the stage of evolution where they have not yet developed autonomy, common sense, and self-responsibility … that they desperately hunger for an authoritarian figure of Biblical proportions who can lead them by the hand out of their self-created misery into greener pastures.
I get it. I also get that the whole thing is just a story – a ginormous human movie drama playing out on the world stage. Bigly.
All my waking hours, seven days a week, are pretty much spent writing about, thinking about and talking about the ego and the illusory status of the physical world and the equally illusory status of our separate selves and how difficult it is to see beyond the veil of apparent physicality to the underlying truth that there’s nothing physical happening here whatsoever and everything we hold near and dear, starting with our selves, is vastly less substantial than cotton candy …. just stickier.
Just like “Cate Montana” is an illusion, so is Donald Trump. His big lumbering body is a bunch of interpenetrating fields of energy/information … basically a hologram.
We talk about the world being made of particles and think we know what we’re talking about. But despite the concept and the automatic meaning we give the word, particles aren’t physical at all. There are no teeny-tiny pieces of matter forming the bricks and mortar of this reality. Donald Trump’s body doesn’t tangibly exist. And if you say, “Yeah? I shook his hand outside Trump Tower Saturday night. And it was thick and plump and moist and not at all as big as he’d like it to be.”
And I’ll say right back,”Hey, electron repulsion guarantees you didn’t actually “touch” his hand at all. It just seemed as if you did.
“Reality is merely an illusion … albeit a persistent one,” said Albert Einstein. And he wasn’t having us on.
Donald Trump’s life story and beliefs and accomplishments and failures and hopes and dreams are a bunch of gossamer memories and concepts spun out on an intangible holographic stage set … same goes for Hilary … and you and me. All the screaming multitudes, the twitter storms, the blogging, the flogging, the hashtags, the running commentary, the outrage, the moral indignation, the judgment is truly sound and fury signifying absolutely nothing.
NADA.
So, come on Orville. Give it a whirl. Don’t take the world serious.
This time I’ll try to take my own advice.