Commentary: Behold! See, mortals, the unseeable: This week brought us a glimpse of a black hole, briefly flooding social media timelines and popular science digests with a blurry image of a fiery orange ring that newspaper writers have likened to everything from the eye of Sauron to a donut.
To be precise, the photograph shows us the shadow of a black hole. The orange ring represents a glowing gas disk around the hole. Moreover, those are not the actual colors. The red, yellow and orange, a scientist from Penn State tells us via Space.com, are used to depict a range of emissions, and to the naked eye the ring would probably look white. (Before we got sucked into the black hole, that is.)
So much for the eye of Sauron.
At any rate, it is appropriate to call this a picture of a black hole even if, in precise terms, we know what it really is, just as we refer to sunrise and sunset without believing that the sun is literally going up and down in the sky. (We know that, right? Is everyone still with me?)
For ease of communication, we resort to such terms as a kind of shorthand. They are helpful, in the way that reusable plates called stereotypes (also known as clichés) made printing jobs less labor intensive in the era of movable type and freed up equipment for other jobs.
The hazard comes when we cease to understand we are using shorthand, when our thought increasingly consists of clichés and euphemisms. They accumulate like intellectual bladder stones, with similar implications for thought and communication.
This brings me, at last, to my topic: the argument over “electability” to be found in opinion columns like this one.
The Democratic primary field for challenging President Donald Trump in 2020 is crowded with candidates, while so far one Republican challenger — former Massachusetts Governor William Weld — is challenging Trump.
Meanwhile, people who write political opinion stories are once again offering candidates and readers their counsel on what makes a candidate “electable.”
Let us state it outright: Pundits often inflate and distort the concept of “electability” and they persist even after 2016, when they laughed out loud at Trump’s chances of becoming president.
A candidate who appears on enough ballots to win the required electoral votes is electable. Beyond that, the term is a euphemism and should be wielded with awareness and care.
Thus, the advice of this pundit is to think for yourself and think clearly; read whatever inspires you to examine what you want, learn more than you already know, communicate effectively and participate in citizenship to the extent you wish. At least mark a ballot, while we still have some electoral democracy in which to participate.
If it were not for years of overblown speculation by the same punditocracy about Russian influence, we might have to admit that notwithstanding Russian provokatsiya, Hillary Clinton blew it in the rust belt states in 2016 and lost the electoral vote to her opponent. There might be useful lessons in that.
A candidate may be unelectable if they cannot get on enough ballots or raise enough money to campaign effectively. Beyond this, citizens are not well-served by discussions of electability, so often used to relegate candidates with bold proposals to the sidelines, constraining political discourse and imagination.
What are the values we hide behind this word? It may be a euphemism for whiteness, ideology, social class or youth and beauty, depending on individual prejudice.
Sadly, as a pseudo-journalistic term it becomes a means to discipline voters instead of informing them.
Desert Sage writes on politics and the humanities. Share your thoughts at adammassa@lcsun-news.com.