An interesting thing happened on the way to the White House: A pre-mortem of post-Apocalypse 2016 America
By Mark Cromer
Death can be a strange thing indeed.
Be it the tragic demise of a desperate salesman who was dying a little more everyday inside as he slowly awoke to realize the life he dreamed had drifted away while he was sleep walking through the drudgery of his actual reality, or the spectacular collapse of nation-state that rose from the global ash heap of World War II to straddle the globe as a superpower empire for nearly a century only to prove the adage: the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
It’s difficult to say whether Arthur Miller might have ever imagined a garish political season such as 2016—with its lurid sideshows, carnival barkers, undisguised thirst for raw power, uncorked venom and nakedly profane animus—would serve as something of a flickering neon tombstone for a nation that once was, but the playwright might not have been terribly surprised.
When Death of a Salesman debuted on Broadway in early 1949, just seven short months before the Soviet Union detonated their first atomic bomb (code named ‘First Lightning’), Miller’s classic turned the nation’s cosmopolitans’ attention, however briefly, on the largely illusory nature of The American Dream with its feverish visions of ‘success’ that inevitably breaks in a cold sweat at the end of the day for most of their fellow countrymen.
Miller’s poetic telling of Willy Loman’s long slog to oblivion that culminates in a self-induced exit punctuated with all the glory of a car crash that’s followed by an epilogue of his nearly empty funeral and his widowed wife’s whimpering they were finally ‘free and clear’ resonated across a country that was transitioning from a post-industrial age into a post-war economy that offered plenty of busts along with its boom. The play’s relatively new story of the American everyman being devoured by a fantasy life that was born amid the quiet despair of desiring something more, and not just success, but rather the more elusive satisfaction, landed on The Great White Way just as the pop religion of mass consumerism was taking shape from coast to coast.
They may say the neon lights are bright on Broadway, but the primal glow of wanting more has burned infernally brighter in the hearts of man since his earliest days in the cave huddled around the fire dreaming of sharper sticks and bigger stones, and millennia later Madison Avenue finally decided to package that desire and sell it back to them on a scale fitting of the new Nuclear Age.
The resulting blast radius of mass consumerism and its perpetual fallout of unquenchable desire has produced a series of evermore rapidly degenerating political mutants peddling plans of sustainable gluttony with bipartisan variables that are ultimately as different as Colgate and Crest, Coke and Pepsi.
And thus, this deep into the radiation field of modern American politics and through the decimated landscape of the nation’s gutted production plants that are backlit by the glare from the thriving 24-hour EverythingMarts with drive-thru service for consumer convenience, come Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. He with a perpetually pursed frown and a vocal chip programmed with a half dozen lines on a loop and she with a frozen smile and all the authentic charm of a glassy-eyed Stepford Wife whose battery pack is starting to melt in her back.
An election like no other hardly begins to describe it.
More like an entombment dressed as an election even as the exclamation mark is chiseled on the grave marker of a political system that died—like the nation it was formed to govern—from a zealous indulgence of the original seven deadly sins along with probably a dozen or so more for good measure.
So step right up and enjoy the show.
For all the curled-nosed, feigned disgust over the lack of civility and the proclamations of electorate exhaustion at the brazen dishonesty that have become the hallmarks of Campaign 2016, few seem to be asking just how America arrived here?
If the medium is the message, then messengers Trump and Clinton are hitting all the their marks perfectly in the political medium in 2016.
Trump’s rise as the billionaire bullhorn of the vox populi reads like a killed script from one of Hollywood’s ‘unscripted’ reality shows that was axed because it was a tad light on the drunken dysfunction even if he does Tweet like Ozzy guesting on The Kardashians in mid-bender, compulsively obsessing over utterly meaningless distractions. The man who would harness the bottled lightning of the white working class sounds increasingly like a diva in a suit, more content to spit out invective over his portrayal on Saturday Night Live rather than prepare for and issue a blistering, in-depth, sustained attack on Clinton’s open border dreams during all three debates.
And Clinton? Well, her passionless rerun has all the genuine vision as another horrifying spinoff that came before it: AfterMASH. And yet somehow Clinton’s political premise is even less convincing than Col. Potter, Klinger and Father Mulcahy managing to reunite for more shenanigans at the same hospital stateside after the 4077th folded its tents in Korea.
But far from tuning out from this bad programming or demanding mid-season replacements, Americans have tuned into Campaign 2016 in record-shattering numbers. And they are likely to turn out to vote in November in a tsunami election that could, no matter what the political meteorologists forecast, go either way.
But to what end?
To be sure, the epic struggle between nationalism and globalism will be decided in America with this election and in the decade that follows it, as the nation’s borders will either be clearly enforced or quietly erased with finality, as so-called ‘free trade’ deals will either continue apace or will be revoked and replaced with bilateral trade that has the American worker at heart and as the military will either continue to be ordered to carry the banners of the American empire ever deeper into foreign lands or is finally called home at long last.
But even if Trump’s nationalistic run emerges victorious, his triumph may well prove to be pyrrhic as an engrained mass consumer culture is faced with a check on its vast appetite for the cheap spoils the empire and its foreign franchises have delivered it.
Precious little was said throughout the campaign about ‘entitlement spending’ which is approaching two-thirds of the entire budget, with each candidate muttering perhaps a few generalities totaling a few minutes combined on the issue, even as it portends disaster if left unchecked. Across the states, public pensions are poised to swallow entire state budgets whole, a crisis with grim national ramifications, but Clinton and Trump focused more on whether he was a sexual predator or if she had figuratively held the pillow over the faces of her husband’s victims.
The election isn’t so much rigged as it is wrecked, the inevitable car crash ending that culminates a nation’s journey into night after it had too long imbibed on the glory of its story and the promise of a future it was certain would come but never quite did.
As Miller’s Willie Loman was America’s struggling everyman in 1949, the American body politic has now become Willie Loman; desperate, angry, aggrieved and delusional right up until the car ride of Election 2016 carried it away forever.
