Can I get four quarters for a dollar? Thanks.
I read a Facebook post about a friend of mine who tried to
make a transaction easier for a cashier at McDonald’s. She was in the
drive-through lane, ordered some food costing $ 4.37, and when she arrived at the
window to pay, she handed the cashier $ 5.37 as she happened to find the exact
change in her car’s ashtray along with a five dollar bill in her purse. The
cashier didn’t know what to do. The cashier told my friend that she was paying
too much. After replying that this was true but she was only trying to make it
easier for the cashier to hand back a single dollar instead of $ .63
(supposedly as two quarters, a dime, and three pennies), the cashier called for
the manager.
Silly, right? Was the cashier incapable of doing simple
math? Unwilling, perhaps, but not incapable. In fact, the computer register
probably had a function that told the cashier how much change to return to the
customer even in the event that what was handed through the window was not what
the cashier said was owed. The cashier simply wanted to keep their job because McDonald’s
does not want their employees to think. Thinking creates the potential for
mistakes. Mistakes cost money. So, McDonald’s wants their cashiers not to
think, not be required to do simple math in their heads, so it is not a part of
the job. Thinking is frowned upon and discouraged. The cashier just wants to do
a job and be able to pay for food, rent, and all the other things in their life.
For some, apparently, the arrangement is a perfect symbiosis.
I noticed something else on Facebook the other morning. I
noticed a lack of completed thought in post after post from friends and
acquaintances. There was even a lack of completed thought in the posts from
friends from whom I would have expected much more. This shouldn’t surprise
anyone. Facebook is a free-form blog where people post whatever they want. It
is this idea of “whatever they want” that intrigues me alongside the phenomena
of candidates who also promote “whatever they want.”
To those of you who actually do think, use your brains, and
can do simple subtraction and addition in your heads (even those of you who
believe you do, but don’t), I think I know why we are witnessing a tsunami of
crap from the Republican Party. This tsunami is not limited to the political
arena, however. It is also a recent cultural theme elsewhere (such as
the publishing and music industries).
Let’s start at the beginning. This, by the way, is where
most clear thought begins, surprisingly. If I were a follower, a fan, or a
supporter of D. Trump, why would I be so? What is the attraction? I believe
that the two phenomena of D. Trump’s political popularity and the incomplete
nature of posts on Facebook share an important characteristic.
Both give people what they want. It is just that simple.
Because Facebook lacks any accountability for the quality of
posts, through an absence of oversight, they provoke a dumbing-down of content and
a reduction to our baseless, irrational, and primal thoughts and feelings;
especially if that is what members want to do. No one is required to make
sense, or finish a thought, or even have a point. We get to rant out loud
without being required to express or declare the real source of our
dissatisfaction through personal introspection. We get to muse without ever
reaching a point. We get to attempt humor without the potential booing or
catcalling from an audience. We get to release the darker forms of our nature
without any responsibility for the consequences, because there aren’t any.
There aren’t any professors grading your posts, parents correcting your grammar,
or pastors wagging their fingers at you. And that is the biggest attraction of
all for most of us.
This absence of accountability is what M. Huckabee, T. Cruz,
and D. Trump are encouraging because social media helps them connect to voters
on this level and not require any thought or reasoning, or reach any
conclusions based on consequence. And connecting with voters is what it is
really all about, whatever the message happens to be. We vote for the candidate
with whom we can most comfortably associate.
I have also noticed from political pundits a clarion call to
attend to the rising power of social media and an additional question of why
the Republican Party does not use it more effectively, along the successful
lines used by Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. I think the pundits are wrong,
however. I think all the candidates are using social media very effectively.
The strategy of the current batch of candidates is simply too banal to be
revealed as intelligent nor is it something that will be grasped by those who
want and refuse to stop pursuing an intelligent line of discussion. They don’t
recognize it because it is the antithesis of intelligent and well thought out
rhetoric. The Republican candidates pander to the baser instincts of
an electorate who are intellectually turned off – via the overwhelming noise
from TV, Facebook, automated cashiers, personal addictions, and any number of
influences that beat them down without any viable defense against it. The
candidates want their followers to embrace ill-conceived answers because it
promises to make everything simple and understandable. Bring back religious
influence to government, some declare. Build a huge wall to keep out illegal
immigrates, says another. They promise easy fixes that are based on a
purposeful lack of thought. They promise what cannot possibly be delivered
because they believe no one wants to be required to weigh and consider the
consequences. Promises are rarely kept by politicians, after all, but empty promises
have only ever put power-hungry people in positions of authority.
I have many friends who work in meaningless and otherwise
demeaning jobs. How they got there is not important right now. They are otherwise
intelligent people, so why do they stay in these meaningless occupations and
remain in lives full of drudgery?
They are overwhelmed. Not with tough and complex decisions,
or traumatic events (although this may be the case in some of their lives), but
with the force of anti-intellectual propaganda that is everywhere both inside
and outside of McDonald’s. Their survival does not require them to be
intelligent. Thinking is hard and harder still if you are out of practice or
discouraged from doing so regularly. Whether you, as a voter, are trying to
make complex decisions about who to hire as President, or simply keeping your
job at McDonald’s, thinking takes practice. Doing simple math in your head
takes practice. Seeing through a politician’s bullshit is only slightly harder
but still takes practice.
The Republican Party, and also the Democratic Party, know
this. Both parties use this strategy of shallow platitudes and promises aimed
at inflaming our base and ill-formed thoughts and desires. They give their
followers the opportunity to hate without consequence, to marginalize others
without repercussions, or to embrace higher, if unrealistic, moral standards which
is the easiest thing in the world to do especially if you aren’t accustomed to
thinking things through in your own life, continue to make bad decisions for
yourself, and end up in a meaningless and demeaning life.
D. Trump embodies “success” to many in America – but only so
far as his public image will allow. Confident, arrogant, and intellectually
devoid of merit, D. Trump says whatever he wants. We can identify with a
candidate like this who makes the big decisions seem so easy to solve, especially
without doing much thinking, as long as we don’t scratch the surface and
realize we are supporting something that has larger, more complex issues and
consequences attached. The reality of D. Trump’s financial success – the taking
advantage of someone's misfortune or weakness (Trump owns or owned casinos where
people with a weakness for gambling hand over their money in a rigged game of
chance) – is a story of unchecked greed and corruption, arrogance at the
expense of others, and cold immorality.
These real factors are too complex, or believed to be so, by those who refuse
to practice even simple math without a calculator and therefore are out of
practice when important thoughts need to be considered. If we were forced,
somehow, to look at these real factors, we couldn’t in our own good consciences
support a man like D. Trump, T. Cruz, or M. Huckabee. But we want to because we
are out of practice. They let us feel all the negative, selfish and greedy
impulses we have in our minds but keep to ourselves. Since no one on the D.
Trump side of the political fence is going to have a meaningful conversation
about the facts and issues, or the consequences if their plans were implemented, we don’t
have to think about them if we call ourselves Republican. We get to remain in
our unformed, non-critical thought patterns of disappointment, hatred, and
obfuscation. We do so especially when we see D. Trump deflect statements and
questions from those know-it-all liberals and lean back in his chair with a
satisfied look on his face claiming to have won the argument. They get to say
things we wish we could say out loud, and act the way we would want to act. By
associating ourselves with them, we get to live vicariously through them and
feel some form of power by association (all the while not examining anything
too stringently because doubt, guilt, and remorse are things we already have
too much of in our own lives).
To support a candidate like T. Cruz, or M. Huckabee, or D.
Trump – or even Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton – means we are safe. They
seem to be doing all the thinking for us. We don’t have to think too much to
feel we are a part of something. And if we don’t have to think too much, we
can’t be wrong, or be burdened with life’s irritating knack for complexity, can
we? Life is so much better when we don’t think, especially when we’re so out of
practice with it and cannot embrace our own thoughts and work things out for
ourselves.
Let’s see. Two plus fourteen is, what? Give me a minute. I
can work this out. Thirteen? No. Wait. That’s not right . . .
G. M. Potter
email: gmpotterhome@gmail.com
Facebook: gmpotterhome
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