I was just watching an episode of Rick and Morty where there’s this talking cat and Rick is vexed by it and where it came from. The cat posits: can’t we not know where I came from and just have fun?
And Rick says these things should not be mutually exclusive, so Rick scans the cat and discovers the truth, something so awful that he ends up memory wiping his travel companion’s mind of any knowledge of the cat’s origin story.
And Jerry blinks and says did we find out where the cat came from? Rick says he’s from space. Jerry laughs and says it’s a mind f***. And that cat is allowed to roam freely, afforded an opportunity to soul bond with a dragon. I find that there is some kind of connection I draw between that war crimes cat and U.S. politics.
Initially, I thought that Jerry was the U.S. electorate, the memory wipe is the collective forgetfulness we have of past horrors, and the cat is the President. After some reflection, though, I realize that the cat is us, the U.S. electorate. We are allowed to vote into office the worst, most vomit-inducing candidates, in the name of blowing up the system. We are afforded a generosity of sorts, when we forget how bad things were, any time we forge on through this denial and proceed with dignity to future opportunities.
And really, when we move on to future elections, we are afforded a blank slate, where we might create something better. It does not diminish where we’re from and who we’ve voted for in the past, but we’re hoping the past is washed away or just blithely disregarded, and it is, in a way; we are exonerated of what was and march on.
blorgons 