As God is my witness, I can’t comprehend who cares if a politician has “a relatable family.” I care what he’ll do for mine, not what his is like.
The need to see yourself reflected in everything and everybody reminds me of the people who can’t read a novel if they can’t see themselves in the characters. But this fixation on politicians’ families is even worse because it’s not even the politician himself who has to beam you back at yourself but his family, too.
This isn’t a minor point because people are beguiled by this utterly imaginary relatability and forget to demand that politicians actually do something for them.
Clarissa's Blog 
“people are beguiled by this utterly imaginary relatability”
This is a symptom of the thirdworldization of US politics. It’s not about issues it’s about tribal identification….
Even when it seems to be about issues it’s all about surface appearance and empty statements and not any kind of action.
Expect more of this…
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Don’t say more. I can barely take the amount of it we currently have.
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Have had this disucssion with VN friends. They are enamored of American democracy.
“OK, so let’s say you have an election for town mayor. One candidate is honest, smart, a good businessman, and would do a great job. The other candidate is related to you. Who do you vote for?”
“Oh, I see the problem.”
All things considered, they are doing OK right now by basically giving lip-service to communism, but… IRL mostly doing whatever works, and keeps them economically chugging along fast enough that China thinks twice about invading them. The leaders are all elected in sham elections, but whoever’s running things actually wants VN to do well economically, get along with neighboring countries enough to have allies in case China gets aggressive, and does not want the country to be subsumed in the big globalist sludge. They’re not democratic, but they are nationalist.
Not coincidentally, over the nearly twenty years I’ve known them, they’ve gone from *I want to marry an American and move to the US* to *Actually it looks like the future is here in VN. Maybe someday I’ll visit the US on vacation*.
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Also with you on this one. I don’t need to relate to my country’s leaders. I’m voting Harris/Walz for a lot of reasons…but not because I relate to them. And the “Walz as America’s dad” thing is especially annoying to me. He does seem to be a fairly involved father and his children seem to love him. But he is nothing like my Eastern European immigrant father! I find it presumptive that I’m supposed to relate to him in this way.
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Reader self-insert in novels really grates on me. There are many book reviews for books that I feel were splendidly written, with complex, flawed, layered characters, but reviewers basically say “I didn’t like X. I didn’t like what they did and I don’t agree with their actions. Two stars.” The writer is not condoning character actions FFS and is not expecting you to. Is the characters fucked up but realistic? Acting true to themselves? Did you reflect on why they are how they are, why they act how they act? Then the writer did their job.
Not everything is a choose-your-own-adventure children’s book.
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Also, the need to have “likeable” characters really gets to me. A novel about perfectly nice people being perfectly nice to each other would be unreadable, soporific. “Why am I supposed to care about a character who cheats on her husband?” Nobody is asking you to “care” but why not enjoy the story instead of virtue-signaling about your dislike for cheaters?
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Right?! And where is reader curiosity, where and empathy? Where is interest in learning what makes people behave in certain ways? Most of us would probably be far less virtuous than we imagine ourselves to be if we, too, were to face the circumstances that breed detestable behavior in others. Some readers do not want to face the darker aspects of the human nature even in fiction, where it would be safe and prudent to do so.
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What do you think about the idea that people need representation because until they see others of their race/sex/gender prominently featured in their profession they wouldn’t go into it? I follow tennis and this talk is incessant (first arab woman to win a WTA tournament, inspiration for millions of girls in the middle east blah blah). I’m like, why can’t little girls be inspired by other female players? I’ve never chosen my sporting heroes based on race or sex or nationality. Am I weird?
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I have always found this extremely bizarre. I have met literally zero Ukrainian women in my profession, and I’m doing fantastic. I’ve been inspired and mentored by colleagues of a different sex, race, age group. It’s some weird voodoo science that seeing a person “who looks like you” will somehow transmit their intelligence or success to you by osmosis. This is yet another anti-scientific invention of academia.
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I have always preferred to work for/with men.
I don’t get it either.
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My two best students right now are a black male and a trans female. We don’t identify with each other in any way but I love working with them because they are both mega smart, extremely hard-working and very curious. They clearly dig me, as well. All this identity stuff is such a bore.
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Which Corporate/lobbies invest to get a person elected into Office. Herein defines the fraud of US elections. The People do not elect a person to Office, but rather a Government established Corporate monopoly invests to get their man elected into Office.
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