Recently, I was watching the movie, All About Eve, and loving the high drama of stage life full of back-stabbing and theatrics. Then I thought about the election year… damn… what a parallel. A few juicy quotes from that film tell the tale of the insane politics we’re living through.
Politics is always nuts, but how did we get this out of whack? Fear and anger have pushed not only the country but the world into dangerous ground. Fear and anger born of economic instability brewing for decades and now coming home to roost. The cocks are crowing and the eggs have been laid for foment. World War II sprang from the Great Depression; can we control the instability of the world so the ominous specter of another world war doesn’t rise? Is the turmoil in the Middle East the fire or the match?
The rise of anger has been manipulated by Trump for pure self-interest but he did not create it. He hides his flaws while exposing the weaknesses of his opponents. Bette Davis’ character, Margo Channing eloquently says, “In this rat race, everybody’s guilty until they’re proved innocent.”
Hillary is no angel either. Maybe she’s channeling Bette Davis… “The things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster.” Clinton has experience and is probably as nasty as any other world leader; perhaps she deserves to be president. After all, “Everyone has a heart—except some people.”
And bizarrely, the populist breeze creates an atmosphere where the candidates trot across the stage expounding on how they ‘know your pain’ as if they were average folks. In a paraphrased line from All About Eve from the theater critic character, “This ignores the fact that their greatest attraction to the public is their complete lack of resemblance to normal human beings.”
It’s been a slimy presidential race to the bottom. God, I’ll be glad when election evening is here. But fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night…
K.E. Lanning