You Don’t Have To Be A Genius To Flee A Burning Building

Imagine someone waking up in the middle of the night and smelling smoke and thinking they hear the crackling of burning wood. Without much time to awaken from their sleep, they manage to throw on a bathrobe without caring too much about how well it’s tied. Perhaps they have time to put on their slippers. They can’t find the dog leash so they grab the belt that they normally use to encircle their prodigious belly to use on Fido, perhaps grab an item or two they feel are irreplaceable, and head out the front door.

If one were to view this person from the house next door, standing there in their bunny slippers with chew and slobber marks from the dog, with a bad case of bed hair, their belly and underpants showing from beneath an old robe, and holding a TV remote and a bust of Elvis, you might be tempted to mock them. If you were unaware of the burning house, you’d see the befuddled look on their face and consider that person a moron. And all that you care to think about that person may or may not be true, but the most important thing to know is that person was at least smart enough to leave a burning building.

Now consider the person in the building next to theirs, unaware of the fire. In fact, even if they were aware of the fire, they would still be pointing a finger at the person standing in their rabbit slippers, never stopping to think that perhaps the fire from their neighbor’s house might have spread to their own. Such cluelessness might be enough to make the person standing out on the street laugh to see his jeering neighbor’s house also on fire, despite his own situation. I imagine that the laughter from the person the street would be quite irritating to the one still comfortable in their own house. In fact, they would soon grow tired of the nuisance the person in the robe was making and hope that someone would shut them up so that they could go back to sleep. Perhaps a call should be placed to the authorities to deal with this person so that others in this comfortable suburban neighborhood can get back to their king-sized beds so they might be rested in time for their corporate office job in the morning.

Let me explain my little political metaphor, for you, if you’ll permit me. The houses are our two political parties. The fire is the corruption caused by corporate control. The evacuee is MAGA, the goofy apparel is Donald Trump. And if we need to put a name to the person wanting to get back to bed, well let’s just call him Rob Reiner.

When your house is on fire, you are faced with a pass/fail test. The test is not a very difficult one, either, I’d think even the dog could have mastered it if he was capable of operating a door knob. So I am not heaping praise on MAGA by suggesting they were smart enough to escape a burning building (the establishment Republican Party). They may not know the cause of the fire. They may be blaming the fire on communists or windmills. But at least they smelled smoke and listened to their basic instincts. At least they were not so clever as to turn on MSNBC to see if what they were smelling was in fact their house on fire.