ELECTION DAY 2018

To those who see politics in everything:

In the movie “The Matrix,” the hero is offered the choice of a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill gives you knowledge, freedom, uncertainty and the brutal truths of reality. The blue pill offers security, happiness, beauty, and the blissful ignorance of illusion.

In film “Total Recall,” the hero is offered a red pill which is described as ” a symbol, of your desire to return to reality.” There is no blue pill — but Schwartzenegger probably didn’t need the “little blue pill” (Viagra) anyway.

In “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (which is a fantasy life) , Ben Stiller travels to Greenland and rents a car at the airport. He asks the rental agent “Do you have any cars available?” and is told “Yeah, we have a blue one and a red one,” and the hero (Stiller) takes the red one.

In 1969, the US initiated the lottery system to draft young men for the Vietnam War. The 366 days of the year (including February 29) were printed on slips of paper. These pieces of paper were then each placed in opaque blue plastic capsules and drawn from a jar. The first 195 birthdates drawn were basically given the blue pill.

For the more esoteric people (like, those who actually read as well as watch movies,) the fascinating non-fiction book “Gödel, Escher, Bach, and Eternal Golden Braid” by Douglas Hofstadter (1979) — described by the author as “in the spirit of Lewis Carroll” — has a section where the characters in Escher prints “pop out” of the two-dimensional world (and into our 3D world) by drinking from a blue phial (like a medicine bottle) and “push into” the 2D world by drinking from a red phial.

So which is the real world and which is the looking glass world? Red or Blue?