As I often wonder why I hate politics so much, I was intrigued by Thomas Sowell’s recent observations:
It is hard to understand politics if you are hung up on reality. Politicians leave reality to others. What matters in politics is what you can get the voters to believe, whether it bears any resemblance to reality or not.
Not only among politicians, but also among much of the media, and even among some of the public, the quest is not for truth about reality but for talking points that fit a vision or advance an agenda. Some seem to see it as a personal contest about who is best at fencing with words.
Unfortunately, I understand the above all too well. I dislike arguments, and it is pure torture to be forced to listen to people who enjoy arguing not so much because they really care about the merits of their position (much less the truth), but because they simply love hearing themselves talk.
But that is the ugly reality of politics.
If only I could learn to see it as surreal, I might enjoy it more.
In that respect, Salvador Dali offered some food for, um, politically surreal thought:
…the contemporary hunger for the irrational is always keenest before a cultural dining table offering only the cold and unsubstantial leftovers of art and literature and the burning analytical preciseness of the particular sciences, momentarily incapable of any nutritive synthesis because of their disproportionate scope and specialization, and in all events totally unassimilable except by speculative cannibalism.
Here lies the source of the enormous nutritive and cultural responsibility of Surrealism, a responsibility that has been growing more and more objective, encroaching, and exclusivist with each new cataclysm of collective famine, each new gluttonous, viscous, ignominious and sublime bite of the fearful jaws of the masses wolfing down the congested, bloody, and preeminently biological cutlet of politics.
Nothing beats having talking points that fit a vision.
Especially if they are edible!
