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The Arrow of Time, Lodged Deep in Our Political Posterior
This time, the narratives and spin are not working, the ridiculousness of it all temporarily breaking through the political media matrix.
How we humans view politics and how we view time, mortality, and all the mysteries of life and the universe are usually compartmentalized for easy psychological storage, a necessary separation to prevent cross contamination and spoilage. But every once in a while, when those streams cross, good living hell does the language of the commentariat fail to properly explain the ensuing mess.
How we use language to simplify big ideas into small words is a topic the learned and credentialed can spend a lifetime working through. But some of our linguistic clashes in nomenclature are apparent. In politics, right and left are well established terminology to give folks some situational awareness as to where on that spectrum a particular person or thing is falling. Dealing with time however, that nomenclature doesn’t work. If we said yesterday was to the left of tomorrow but tomorrow is to the right of right now, you’d have good lyric, but a bad explainer. Concepts that undergird our understanding of time, like memory and volition, are essential concepts to political narratives and the manipulation thereof but aren’t explicitly discussed, even as ads heavy on nostalgia and brimming with hope and…
