Harrison Glicklich | A villain in our midst

Good Luck | Or, my obsession with Nova Scotia

By Harrison Glicklich 11/20/16 10:16pm

If you have been paying neurotic attention to blockbuster releases recently, you may have noticed that there have been seven major superhero movies so far this year, many of them major box office successes. In light of this onslaught, there seems to be a fathomless famine for power fantasy and clean conflict resolution in modern day America. It is worth noting that these films all have one thing in common: The villain is evil, bent on destruction and doomed to fail. It does not take a wise woman to know that none of these qualities describe real-life villains. Yet, so-called “superhero thinking” seems to have infected our public perception. We are shocked to learn that sometimes the villain does win.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the response to the recent presidential election in the United States. On the ballot we had someone with no experience in government or public service, a mendax with no workable policies. This candidate is a lifelong multimillionaire — and a tacky one at that — who claimed to represent working-class interests, a demagogue who fomented hatred against women and people of color and, as recently as last week, settled numerous fraud cases against his for-profit universities for $25 million.

This is a person who has proposed appointing career lobbyists and the executive chairman of Breitbart News to positions in his cabinet, someone whose motivation in seeking the highest office in government appears to be personal profit and who has not done anything to convince anyone otherwise. Those are all the words I am allowed to say about our president-elect, but you get the point.

How can it be that such a person won the election for the presidency of the United States? Surely, you would think, reasonable people will take a stand, as they always do, and end this bad joke. For many young people, this is a kind of awakening. If you don’t live on Locust Walk or Spring Avenue, so-called reasonable people may not be the majority. Maybe a bold-faced villain can win the affection of millions, and, unlike the plot of a superhero movie, he is not thwarted by a woman in a flashy pantsuit.

If you will let me draw a parallel here, I will remind you of the Halifax Explosion of 1917, which occurred in Nova Scotia as a result of a collision between the SS Imo and the SS Mont-Blanc. The Mont-Blanc was fully-loaded with explosives when, ignoring maritime regulations, the SS Imo exceeded the speed limit and instigated a dangerous pass. The ships managed to barely avoid each other. At this point, the captain of the Imo decided to reverse the ship’s engines, pulling the ships together and resulting in an explosion that left 2,000 dead and 9,000 others injured. The way people talk about the election, you would think it no less dramatic.

But that is not the end of the story. Though the SS Imo was the responsible party in this historical narrative, the ship and its crew managed to avoid destruction. It was repaired and returned to service a year later. However, in 1921 it ran aground off the Falkland Islands and was abandoned.

What can we take away from this? Maybe it’s that incompetence does not go unpunished. I would hope that a president who seeks to appoint career lobbyists and vocal anti-Semites to his cabinet cannot be self-sustaining. But then again, the crew that ruined the Imo may not have been the same one that caused the crash, and maybe the Imo ran aground due to unrelated circumstances. No superheroes here.

What I can say for certain is that things are not as clear-cut as superhero movies make them out to be. Sometimes the villains win and sometimes they win a lot. In the trite words of Brandon Sanderson, “There are no heroes coming to save us. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Yet, in spite of it all, I am not so inclined to believe him. Though it may take eight years, or four, or even fewer, president-elect Imo will have his reckoning.