Formation of a black hole: On the spectacular implosion of the Republican Party
Lately I've been reading about space and time and quarks and protons and neutrons — all things I never learned about in physics, because I never took that course in high school or college. I was a biology major for a couple of years, vaguely pre-med, until I saw physics and organic chemistry looming ahead and changed my major to journalism. While studying the hard sciences, I had also fallen hard for theater, so the shift away from the study of science was partly due to the time-suck of memorizing lines and rehearsals. The gravitational pull exerted by one excellent lecture course on Shakespeare and some superb theater professors set me on a new course. I never lost interest in the things I walked away from then. I have numerous science books around the house that I thumb through and still hope to read. On my desk right now are two stacks of books which contain (along with novels and poetry and a book about running) "The Mathematics Devotional" and "30-Second Biology." For some years I had a cool retro "Calculus for the Practical Man" that I kept thinking I might be able to comprehend.
Reading about how black holes form, I can't stop thinking about the implosion of the Republican Party. The metaphor is perfect, even when extended.
Astrophysicists tell us a black hole is created when a star of a certain size begins to cool and thus loses the heat that keeps the force of gravity at bay. In his "A Brief History of Time," Stephen Hawking compares the steady state of a star with a balloon, the air inside (representing the star's heat caused by nuclear fusion) pushing against the skin, which pushes back (the star's internal gravity). Once the heat dissipates, the star begins to collapse inward until it becomes so dense that light can no longer escape the gravitational pull. The boundary where light reaches, but can go no further, is called the event horizon.
Sound familiar? Swap in "truth" for "light" (light being a standard metaphor for truth) and you have the current condition of the former Grand Old Party.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/formation-of-a-black-hole-on-the-spectacular-implosion-of-the-republican-party/ar-AAKgLW5