Rearranging Reality

We can make our choices—but not confuse the categories with the whole truth.

Every week my first grader brings home a list of spelling words. On Mondays, his job is to cut the words apart and sort them, then write them in columns. Usually, the mechanism for sorting the words is obvious: the words with long As go with the other words with long As, the long Us go with the long Us. When he is done sorting, I do a quick scan and approve his divisions.

Earlier this week, when the work came back home on Tuesday, we found out we had gotten it wrong. He sorted by vowels when he was meant to sort by endings. Of course, it wasn’t really “wrong,” because the vowels were there, too. But since the class was studying endings, that was the exercise. There was more than one way to sort the same collection of words... but not for the assignment.

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I live in South Carolina, where the (almost certainly meaningless) Republican primary will be held in 22 days. Every day I sift through slick red and blue mailers shouting at me IN ALL CAPS that I should vote for Nikki Haley. No policy, not a scrap of pertinent information... just shouting.

(Trump’s team doesn’t send any.)

When I vote in the Republican primary (which I intend to do, though I haven’t before), I have two choices. When it comes to the homework assignment of American presidential elections, we have organized reality into two categories: this candidate, or this one (or sometimes this one, but we all know that’s not a real option).

On February 24, the assignment is to sort according to (a) Nikki or (b) Donald.

OUR NATION IS AT A CROSSROADS THIS IS THE ONE THERE IS NO TURNING BACK IT CANNOT BE UNDONE THE FATE OF THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE RESTS ON THE SHOULDERS OF AN OMNIPOTENT LEADER WHO WILL SAVE YOU FROM YOUR TROUBLES AND YOU WILL BE ETERNALLY AND DIVINELY JUDGED FOR YOUR DECISION

Voting in a presidential primary is an important exercise in democracy. It is a thing we do, like my son’s homework, because effort matters.

That doesn’t mean the exercise reflects reality.

It would have been absurd for my son’s teacher to claim the words couldn’t be sorted the way he had sorted them, by their matching vowels. Empirically, they could be.

Yet he is (and should be) expected to “play by the rules” of the assignment.

This makes sense. What wouldn’t make sense would be if either the teacher or my son were to confuse the assignment with reality. To insist that sorting the words by either their endings or their vowels was the only possibility. We can all agree it would have been foolish for me to storm the school in a rage, frothing at the mouth and shouting something about long Us.

Sometimes when we try to participate in democracy, I think, we confuse the assignment with reality. We think that, because we are asked to choose between two “opposing” sets of ideologies, those two ideologies exist in some ontologically indisputable way outside of our very human, very fallible arrangement of them. (A quick survey of the history of political parties will prove the constant reshuffling of those ideologies for political expediency over the years.)

We forget that there is a better, richer reflection of reality, one in which our own beliefs and opinions transcend shallow (power-motivated) categories. This is the tension we live in: the options as they are presented to us (say, Nikki versus Donald) and then the options we might have in a different, better sort of world.

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It's not just politics. As I often do, I mostly use politics as a metaphor because it is the public example with which every American is familiar. Yes, democracy runs on binaries—offering people a pair of clear (exaggerated) choices, but no more than two. Because otherwise, chaos.

But the entire western world operates on binaries. Dichotomy is the fuel that runs advertising; it’s the way capitalism can get the most mileage out of a simple statement.

A beauty campaign insists:

YOU CAN BUY THIS FACE CREAM.

Or

YOU CAN LOOK OLD.

Two choices. Pick one.

It would be highly inefficient and ineffective for them to, instead, tell us:

YOU CAN BUY THIS FACE CREAM.

Or

YOU CAN LOOK OLD.

Or

YOU CAN BUY THIS FACE CREAM AND STILL LOOK OLD.

Or

YOU CAN NOT BUY THIS FACE CREAM AND GO ABOUT YOUR DAY.

Or

YOU CAN SPEND THE MONEY YOU WOULD HAVE SPENT ON FACE CREAM ON ICE CREAM. IT’S REALLY TOTALLY UP TO YOU!

Here is what advertising does: It identifies our basest longings, then simplifies and exaggerates them. With our choices dramatically narrowed, we are more likely to act. To spend.

But, in an effort to stay human, our job is to remember that binaries almost never align with reality. Our job is to hear the message:

YOU CAN BUY THIS FACE CREAM

Or

YOU CAN LOOK OLD

and offer ourselves other choices, such as:

YOU CAN SHOVE THAT FACE CREAM UP YOUR

It turns out, this game of responding to advertisements in your head is a very fun game to play. Here’s one from my inbox just this week.

To which I replied, in my head:

Or

MY SKIN IS AN INSENTIENT CELL SANDWICH WITH NO UNALIENABLE RIGHTS WHATSOEVER.

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Artists are the best at reminding us that reality is not, like a computer, operating with merely a binary system of zeros and ones.

In truth, the materials every artist works with are limited. The painter has only so many colors, the chef only so many ingredients, the musician only so many chords. The writer has only so many words, made of so many letters. But the job of every artist is the same: See the same things in a new way. Pay such close attention to your materials that you can, with much practice, begin to call out an arrangement that has yet to be arranged.

Artists spend their whole lives trying to get at reality.

This is what we can learn from them. We may not spend every day doing it, but we can practice moments of trying to get at reality.

When we are told

YOU CAN BACK NIKKI

Or

YOU CAN BACK DONALD

We can practice by adding

Or !!!

YOU CAN HAVE CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTIONS TO BOTH CANDIDATES BUT STILL VOTE IN THE REPUBLICAN PRIMARY EVEN THOUGH YOU THINK THE WHOLE SYSTEM IS A MESS AND OFFERS ZERO OPTIONS THAT ALIGN WITH YOUR DIVERSE AND NUANCED BELIEFS AND ALSO YOU ARE JUST STILL THINKING ABOUT THAT ICE CREAM

All of us are working with finite “materials”—a limited number of options and ideas and ways of moving forward. But the crudest thing that might be done with those materials is to sweep them into two piles and call that reality. That reflects the cognitive aptitude of a toddler.

And yet, that is what 2024 here in America will attempt to convince us to do. It will attempt to convince us that the whole of reality is actually divisible into two piles. Only. two. piles.

It will attempt to convince us there is only one way to do the homework.

First: Nikki and Donald, and later (almost certainly) Donald and Joe.

I know I am not the only one dreading the rhetoric. We’ve all been sorted onto two teams, teams that don’t even make sense, and yet a terrifying number of people on each side are panting Dobermans straining their leashes. Who can blame the Dobermans—we have been convinced that the stakes of this contest are not in any way artificial or manufactured for political expediency, but our very selves. Our souls.

What if we just stopped buying it? What if we completed the homework but, in our conversations with one another, and even in public, we behaved like little artists, creating alternatives, looking for better ways? What if we became good at ignoring the binary narrative and good at taking care of one another in all the personal, nuanced, messy ways humans actually require?

That’s what art does: It upsets the way things are.

By insisting on alternatives and newness, art gets at reality. We can all practice this.

And the beauty of creating is that any time we make a new thing, we displace an old one.