This image has been floating around my Facebook feed for a couple of days now and I’m getting to a point where I need to rant about how inaccurate this metaphor is. It’s easy to feel clever when you stumble upon a metaphor that you think explains a situation, but if there are major and important discrepancies between the metaphor and the real situation, all you’re doing is confusing things.
“But this is an apt metaphor!” you might say. Well no, it’s not. Obviously no metaphor is perfect, but there are a couple pertinent areas where this one does not map accurately onto reality. There are two that seem highly important to me.
The first is that this metaphor implies that if we fail, Trump fails and vice versa. A pilot has a vested interest in landing a plane safely because if it crashes then they will die too. But here’s the problem: TRUMP IS NOT ON THE PLANE WITH US. If we (America, the American people, minorities) get fucked over, crash and burn, and die, Trump does not. He’s got a little golden parachute or an escape pod or maybe he’s just on a totally different plane. Our dear president has the money and resources to survive whatever he might do to the plane (our country). This is actually true of MOST presidents, although Trump is wealthier than most and appears to have this uncanny knack of just suing everyone who suggests he might have failed. But it is absolutely possible for a president to “crash” the country while remaining 100% safe and fine themselves. That’s one of the reasons that people are concerned with the perceived temperament of a president: he does not have a personal motivation to keep the plane in the air, so we want someone empathetic enough to care about those of us who will die if it crashes.
But the other, perhaps MORE relevant concern is that Trump’s stated goal is a goal that involves either kicking a lot of minorities off the plane to their death, or just nose diving the plane into the ground, depending on how many of his stated goals you believe he actually wants to put into action. This is where the metaphor truly breaks down.
Yes, I do want Trump to fail. I want him to fail because if he does what he wants to do, our flight will crash and burn. Honestly, I think the more apt metaphor is that America is in one plane with Trump and his cronies in another plane and they’re shooting at us. I would really really like them to fail. Not because I’m willing to fuck over America in order to see a politician that I dislike fail, but rather because from the perspective of the people who are protesting, writing letters, afraid, etc. Trump succeeding means that we lose. We lose our health care, our marriages, our legal gender identities, our access to abortion and birth control, our freedom of speech, our ability to freely enter and exit the country, our access to college, our good public education…in some cases we may even lose our lives. I would like him not to succeed at hurting me and all the people I love.
It all depends on what you mean by “succeed” and “fail”. If by succeed you mean “is a good president who doesn’t start WWIII, doesn’t follow through on any of his campaign promises, and generally doesn’t do anything” then yeah, I’m for it. But if by succeed you mean “gets a fraction of the legislation that he promised through Congress” then no. I do not want him to succeed. Because I think that would make him an awful president, and would fuck over our country.
There’s nothing unpatriotic, selfish, or petty about hoping that someone does not accomplish a goal that you think is awful.
We Got So Far To Go 