Onion Cap

I like Hillary.  She is a strong, intelligent, and thoughtful person.  I believe if I ever have a chance to sit down and talk with her for a half an hour, I will like her even more.  I’d like to have a beer with her.  I bet she’s hilarious.  It’ll never happen, because with her schedule and the project she has undertaken to be elected President, it’s very unlikely that she and I will ever have a chance to talk about anything.

That’s the problem, really.  People have to imagine what it would be like to meet her and have a coffee and talk about whatever the heck you want.  Voters can’t imagine that happening because she has become something she really isn’t:  a spectacle.

Donald Trump is a spectacle, in the the way that Jessie Ventura, Paul LePage, and Mohamed Ali have been spectacles.  That’s what they are.  They revel in it and are revealed by it.  Creating spectacle, whether you create spectacle by being an idiot, a musician, a wrestler, or a scientist, equates to views, eyeballs, votes and revenue.  It doesn’t mean people adore you, it means they are fascinated with you and mesmerized by your spectacle.  People might even vote for you because they want to keep seeing you; they want you to continue the show, view a spectacle.  For Donald, his creation of spectacle is the only thing he does.  He’s one of the wrestlers in Barth’s Mythologies: “The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess.”  We can’t take our eyes off it.

That will never be Hillary.  She hates being a spectacle.  She just wants to get to work. Hillary is a serous person, a complete policy wonk, a woman who has worked and studied and completed her assignments throughout her life, including sucking it up and working for the man who defeated her in 2008.  She is a class act.  I like her.  I’m going to vote for her.