This article is not for the easily offended. In the past few weeks, as the 2016 Presidential Election appeared closer than ever before, I noticed the candidates and the political situation reminded me of, The Wizard of Oz - not the 2013 version, though. No. That movie does not do justice (in my opinion), and the world of Frank L. Baum suffered a great blow from that Disney filthy rag. Many similarities can be drawn between Frank L. Baum's works and the 2016 election.
First of all, there were the candidates. Donald Trump of the Republican Party and Hilary Clinton of the Democratic Party. Whenever I read or watch something involving both nominees, I kept coming back to the Wicked Witch of the West and the Wizard of Oz. In the novel, both were leaders of their respect Oz territories. The Wicked Witch ruled by separating her citizens from each other. She constantly used magic in attempts to take the Ruby Slippers. The Wizard though, was nothing more than a man using smoke and mirrors to fool the people of Emerald City into thinking everything was perfect through the green tinted lenses dispensed at the gate. He was a man trying to cover up his less than deity-like qualities. The heroine of the tale was young Dorothy Gale from Kansas. She threw water on the Wicked Witch - melting her and freeing the quadlings from the witch's evil grasp. She also manages to pull back the curtain on the Wizard's deception and free the people of Emerald City from their self-accepted stupor.
It seems obvious to me who each character was in the Presidential debates. Donald Trump signified the Wicked Witch of the West. Aside from the physical reasons, he also possessed some of the Witch's scare tactics. President-elect Trump's main scare tactic was separating the United States (legal US citizens) from them (anyone he deemed foreigners). He scared what I coin "The Suburban American" into thinking their 1950s picket fence dream was threatened by the so-called invasion of foreign bodies - who he often referred to as undocumented citizens and anyone of Middle Eastern background. He did this many times on his campaign trail in interviews and on global media in a successful attempt to gain his "Ruby Slippers" -the United States Presidency.
Hilary Clinton was no innocent party either. She portrayed the Wizard. Behind all her expensive suits and Saturday Night Live antics, she was trying her best to keep the American people in rose-colored glasses and see politics her way - much like the Wizard requiring green glasses to be worn at all times in his city. For her entire campaign, rumors of murder, cover-ups, and bribery swirled around the Democratic nominee. Her biggest attempts at putting the glasses on though were when her Benghazi landing story was debunked, and the email scandal in which roughly 30,000 emails were sent to her personal server or deleted that posed a threat to the nation's defense.
Unfortunately,our story has no Dorothy. The closest we got to a heroine came in the form of a little, old, Jewish, man from Vermont named Bernie Sanders. With Sanders as Dorothy, he tried to bring down the Wicked Witch's separation between herself and the rest of the world (the Mexico-Texas Border Wall). He also attempted to make Americans see how crooked-ness, can bring down the curtain of illusion.
Personally, in all of this, I was for neither of the final nominees. Trump was everything wrong with people and Clinton was everything wrong with the government. I stood there thinking how excited I was to vote in the previous election but was too young at the time (one month shy of the age cutoff). Later I thought again, "317 MILLION people in this goddamn country and this is who I'm fucking left with??? Fuck this, I'm going to claim political asylum in Ireland. I'm still eligible for citizenship." Within the past few days of the people rioting... I am not a Trump supporter by any means. However, we are stuck with him and may as well make the best of it.
