I've said many times that I was deeply moved by the musical Hadestown. The touring musical came through here in 2022, and I was completely enamored with it. I walked in intentionally avoiding any understanding about what it was, and it just wrecked me in all good ways. I remember at intermission thinking, "Holy shit, this is so good!" And what's unusual about it is that it's a tragedy. It does not have a happy ending. But to the point of Hermes, the narrator...
Cause here’s the thing
To know how it ends
And still begin to sing it again
As if it might turn out this time
Even the most cursory understanding of Greek tragedy means you know that Orpheus loses Eurydice (spoiler alert!). That's how it ends. It sucks, but you can't look away, and the pain is deeply understood. More importantly though, you have to believe that there are better outcomes possible.
American politics has been, to say the least, really fucking weird the last few years. Everyone, objectively, could declare that fascism, hate, incompetence, committing felonies, is bad. But somehow, a non-trivial portion of the electorate believes that it's OK to overlook all of that provided the guy on "our team" wins.
There's this crazy cognitive dissonance that tries to separate all of this horribleness, which includes dismantling democracy itself, from the decision about who to vote for. It's not like anything that I've ever seen in my lifetime. And yet, I feel like, we're better than this, it doesn't have to end this way.
The classic Greek tragedy is rooted in something noble, something beautiful. Orpheus got a raw deal, and we're attracted to the story because it's rooted in love.
The aforementioned cognitive dissonance is not rooted in love, it's rooted in hate. It quietly started when Obama was president, when the GOP, including Mitch Fucking McConnell, decided to make the party's core policy to be nothing less than, "The opposite of whatever the Black guy in the White House wants." Now, a significant portion of the population has subscribed to this belief, that they're victims and at a disadvantage, just because people who want to be treated fairly, not at an advantage, exist.
This is not the American way. Well, it kinda is, because the European settlers obliterated the natives, and then had a history of discrimination against African-Americans and even white Europeans how immigrated here. But the core sentiment with the founding of the nation was to reject the control of its people by oppressive regimes. It isn't right to advocate for people who want to continue to repress others. But here we are.
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