She’ll be okay as long the she doesn’t get abducted by aliens,” Papa goes.
His family is talking over breakfast when the conversation goes into the subject of what futures the kids have.
“Oh, Papa, what makes you think I don’t want to get abducted by aliens?” daughter replies.
“I want to be adopted by them, Pa.”
“Let them call me Annunaki.”
Laughter!
Clearly, They’ve been watching too much TV. They’ve been watching too much Ancient Aliens, too much anime. The language of pop-culture is getting into their conversations. From there, the conversation goes into the topic of Donald Trump. Of course, along the way, Duterte, Mar Roxas and Philippine politics.
His children are young teenagers while he is an old man of 60, new senior citizen. He is baffled. The kids think like kids but they do not think the way he did when he was their age. He knows we have come to the age of the end of Realism.
The age of Realism would have required that this essay have a functional rationale behind it, some lesson to be learned, some significant insight into the human condition. But not anymore.
What lesson would we learn, or equally, what insight into the human condition could we draw from the running developments of US American politics?
Jeb Bush is right. “Trump is not a serious candidate.”
Trump is good entertainment. He drops his senseless one-liners showing clearly how little background he has of the implications of his words. And the American public and media feed on it in a frenzy.
Yes, he is not a serious candidate. But that is perhaps why he might win. Because he is not serious. And the opposite of serious is funny, or even comic. And comic is what we need in this day and age.
The ancient philosophers had it right when they divided the universe of literature and the human imagination into a dichotomy of tragedy and comedy. If it does not make us want to cry, it should make us laugh. In the contemporary age, it can do both at the same time if not in close proximity. And that’s absolutely perfect.
And when we hear news of Vladimir Putin mouthing an endorsement of Donald Trump, what else do we do but want to laugh and cry at the same time if not in close proximity?
Could it be that Vladimir Putin is watching the same shows we watch? Could we be interconnected this way? Could it be that he is only joking with the world public? How is it possible to joke about anything with your finger that close to the red button that could start World War III? The age of Realism is passing because the reality all about us has become unbelievable. It can only exist in the realm of the unreal: Fantasy.
Take another for-instance with the Philippine candidates for president: Roxas, Duterte, Binay and Poe. Do we detect a sense of the unreal about them?
It is only because they are. Anything we see on television and computer screens are essentially unreal in the same sense that all pop culture is essentially unreal. They exist inside a world not constrained by the laws of logic, neither by gravity nor the other rules of physics. Here, everything occurs practically entirely on whim.
And where Trump is concerned, he can say the most outrageous things and then wait for the ratings to pile in. The ratings are everything. They work the way of god. Only the ratings decide what becomes real. This is the world we live in. And if it makes us want to laugh and cry at the same time or in close proximity, Ladeedah!
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