Who’s going to save US?

As I was saying in a previous post, I do not know a lot about politics: I was referring then more to the local, national (UK and Romania in particular) and perhaps by a generous extension to European politics. About US politics I know nothing.

In my previous post, I was also saying that I the only way I can judge politics, economics, and more generally situations, events and people is by using theatrical tools: I tend to ‘see’ things as if they were taking place on a stage, during a performance.

To be honest, I did not imagine that I would ever be writing a post about Hillary Clinton and the fate of the US elections.

However, ‘the resistible rise’ of Trump Donald (to paraphrase Brecht) has made me (and very many others, I’m sure) meditate on the possible alternatives to having such a character at the helm of the US.

Actress Susan Sarandon suggested in a recent interview that she might consider voting for Trump if the Democrats will have Clinton as their representative in the presidential election.

Whilst I disagree with her, I can understand her perspective.

All I know about Hillary Clinton seems to stubbornly gravitate around a rather poignant (for me) episode when she burst into tears, expectorating some very creepily melodramatic, twisted nationalistic, second-hand Hollywood movie re-digested lines about how great it is to be an American, how many opportunities the country has offered her, how she would not want America to fall backwards and some more in the same vein.

Perhaps not everyone knows this, but there is a moment (call it an Eureka moment if you want) when an actor – sometimes after tonnes of rehearsals – is (if lucky) struck by a sort of illumination. That moment rings like: ‘Yeah! I KNOW now who my character is!’ Such a moment is the product of long accumulations usually ignited by some insignificant detail, which all of a sudden clarifies that very problematic internal relation actor-role.

When I saw Hillary crying whilst tuning her utterings, I suddenly understood how all her falsity, that particular sensation that she somehow manages to speak from above her own self, her very-badly delivered pre-learned responses, and a disconcertingly subdued persona are all tied together by the same glue. It was that sort of sordid second-hand nationalism, most distasteful one, that perfectly mediocre form of understanding and projecting the concept of patriotism, which glues together all the seemingly disparate and disappointing Hillary’s manifestations of falsity – her role therefore.

Now, if I was supposed to vote, I would not choose what I see as the extreme that Sarandon seemed to propose: Donald. Let us be understood: I see in Trump the embodiment of all possible racisms, of viciousness and ruthlessness very strongly bound together by a deep sense of personal frustration, a deficit of intellect and knowledge and a twisted egoism that acts as a cover for all that cerebral vacuum.

Trump stands as an immediate threat for all possible reasons. He would turn America, and by extension pretty much the entire globe into a macabre, most probably murderous circus act.

But Clinton too very much represents, in my view, a form of evil. One of a totally different nature, however.

To me, she is not at all the highly-educated, important political figure, etc.: that to me is just a façade and an image that life, circumstances, and other various arbitrary or less arbitrary contexts (that can be discussed another time) have created and/or manipulated. I guess this is where the acting/theatrical paradigm intervenes again: an actor always searches for those internal, emotional and ‘human’ mechanisms behind a character’s mask: be that character a king, tramp, rich, poor, etc.

Clinton’s inner self has more or less the same horizons as that of a blasé housewife, whose last solace remains watching The young and the Restless, episode 2558. All that, added an inclination towards delusion and a perfectly flat imagination, complemented by an awkward instinct for violence and revenge. That is her true, behind-the-mask ‘character’, in my view. What such character will or could do to America is hard to say. In any case, it would be not a great deal of good, I would opine and God forbid Hillary entering one of her crying/feely scenes: that would bring about true havoc over the world. Clinton can very comfortably serve as president just as long as she does not let herself ‘feel’ anything: that zone (the zone of her emotions and feelings) seems to be her very, very, very bad side.

But, alas, we all know that people cannot be divorced from their feelings and emotions, at least not for long. So Clinton, sooner or later, if elected, is bound to throw a really nasty ‘it’s my party, so I cry if I want to’.

Now comes the question: Who’s going to save US and us?

I believe that the idea of salvation (which here equates with the idea of political progress) has to be put on hold for now. We traverse, I think, one of those moments in history when it seems that it’s no longer us (in this case the Americans) who can decide for our future – this time around, it is a much more intricate network of factors that will orientate our future – a network that seems almost impossible to conquer in the mind, let alone manage. Some like to call this network History, others call it Fate, others Providence, others more simply Life.

Such moment and the particular case of the US might show us democracy’s limitations as a system of understanding, constructing and running society (and our present impossibility to find better management solutions), the vulnerabilities of nations and of humanity in general and above all it might show our failure to conscript existence into systems of thinking, as generously flexible as they might appear.

However, as history has very often showed us, such moments of moral vacuum are most dangerous, for backstage, lurking, always stand waiting the dark forces of society, ready to manipulate the state of things to their advantage. In America, the ones that might benefit most could be the hawks of post-capitalism: the ones that, as one American politician said (in a confrontation with Janet Yellen, Chair of the US Federal Reserve) might want to instate a system of oligarchy in the US.