(C) El Paso Matters.org This story was originally published by El Paso Matters.org and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Opinion: Presidential Debate: Are we a society of superficiality or substance? [1] ['Special To El Paso Matters', 'El Paso Matters', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar'] Date: 2024-07-02 By Sergio Troncoso The question not just for the first presidential debate, but for the 2024 election, is: Are we a society of superficiality or a society of substance? Former President Donald Trump blustered and lied for much of the debate while President Joe Biden stumbled and showed every bit of his age. An inveterate liar and braggart against an old man who has, despite his age, accomplished so much more in the Oval Office than his predecessor. And yet Donald Trump is leading in the polls, according to many accounts. And yet creaky Joe Biden doesn’t get credit for a great record of creating jobs, bringing down inflation, investing in long-term infrastructure, or even a soaring stock market. Sergio Troncoso I’m not here to debate the details, because apparently the details don’t matter anymore in American political discourse. I’m more interested in what it says about us. Our TikTok world, the world where the Kardashians are billionaires, a world of viral social media and praise that glazes with fakery is a place someone like Plato warned us about long ago: a world of images and our obsession with them that is not the real world. What we miss in our happy captivity within superficiality is “the idea of the Good,” which is always difficult to perceive (and yet it is there for those who make the effort). As an example of how far we have fallen into superficiality, I’m struck repeatedly by an old Trump trick that seems to have traction today: “The difference is [Putin] never would have invaded Ukraine. Never. Just like Israel would have never been invaded in a million years by Hamas. … That’s why you had no terror at all during my administration.” Trump uses this hypothetical trick, to declare retroactively, that under his administration, this would have never happened, or that would have happened. I wish I could invest in the stock market retroactively. Can you? I wish I could make the decision not to cross this road, but to cross that one, so that instead of almost being hit by an e-bike on New York’s Upper West Side I could find that diamond ring someone dropped on Broadway. Can you live your life like that? Of course you can’t. Yet Trump repeatedly uses this trick as if it will fool people about his ‘leadership.’ Because it does. It fools superficial people who know you can’t live life like that, yet it feels good to think that way. So, the real doesn’t matter in today’s American political discourse, but a fake life lived retroactively, where everything Trump does is “right” apparently convinces many to vote for him. Wow. The American captives in Plato’s Cave of superficiality can’t tell the difference anymore, because it so hard to “see,” for example, saving, sacrificing and investing for years to create a nest egg; or statistics that prove undocumented immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes and are more likely to be the victims of crimes because of their vulnerable status; or a community that works together—despite having many different racial, ethnic and religious groups—to solve community problems like viruses, environmental crises, and national security issues that left unresolved endanger all of us. What we instead see in our cave is “success” as a quick lottery-type bonanza; or “immigrant crime” as defined by the latest anecdote of an undocumented immigrant robbing or killing someone; or no “community problems” just personal health decisions on viruses and no climate change just bad luck weather. In our cave of superficiality, we don’t believe in long-term success based on sacrifice and good choices, we prioritize individual examples against general statistical truths, we ignore community, or communal goals or goods, but we extol convenient and often selfish individual freedom (even if it hurts all of us). It’s hard in our American Cave to focus on the invisible that works: hard work and sacrifice that leads to failure after failure until, perhaps, that entrepreneur has a breakthrough; perfecting craft year after year so that a writer becomes a much better writer through learning and doing and experimenting; values created on the fly by a new couple who respect each other and sacrifice for each other so that both can have successful careers and work out problems and arguments the day or two after they occur, so that decades later they are still in love. The invisible that works is not TikTok friendly and cannot be a pithy or attractive sound bite. We are too enamored of the visibly appealing, or visibly galling, we are too flummoxed by values that might take more than a week to follow, and we are too quick to judge anyone for a 60-second action, especially if captured by an iPhone. I learned my values from Mexican immigrant parents who never owned a computer, who worked hard and taught their children to work hard Saturdays and Sundays and every summer, and who sat on a bench in front of their adobe house to talk to their neighbors—“la hora social,” they called it—as their friends walked by on San Lorenzo Avenue in dusty Ysleta. Imagine that, talking for hours with your neighbors, in person! We are living in an American cave of superficiality, and we’ve forgotten so much of what is invisible that works and that matters. Trump is the perfect superficial leader in our American cave, in love with himself most of all, trumpeting his gaudy and false “successes,” and self-proclaiming his godlike “retrospective decision-making,” which is just as good in our cave as having to make decisions in real time, like a real leader must. We are about to elect him again, unless we open our eyes to see what’s there, what’s fake and how we will pay for the very real consequences of not knowing the difference. Sergio Troncoso is a native El Pasoan and author of “Nobody’s Pilgrims and A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son.” [END] --- [1] Url: https://elpasomatters.org/2024/07/02/opinion-presidential-debate-joe-biden-donald-trump/ Published and (C) by El Paso Matters.org Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/elpasomatters/