The Final Solution: Alex Honnold For President

Stories of transcendence are ultimately predicated on the notion of a limit. Circumstances mitigate against an individual discovering any kind of respite from a wall that interposes itself between desire and reality. Short of coming back from the dead, there’s no doubt that people accomplish things that defy explanation. It happens when the least favored person, or dark horse, wins. In the past election, Donald Trump started off as a longshot and then rode to victory on the tsunami of populism that struck the United States and Europe at about the same time. The intervention of the Russians in the election didn’t hurt either. Was it a miracle that someone like Trump got elected, or simply a historical phenomenon that had nothing to do with a politician's solitary will? It’s fun to believe in super heroes or villains, to entertain the notion that Christ walked on water and to give credence to the idea that this or that individual is suddenly possessed of superhuman traits that mysteriously facilitate the performance of other-worldly deeds. It still makes no sense that Houdini survived for 90 minutes after being submerged in an air-tight cell. The stories of climbers like Alain Robert, “the human spider-man” or Alex Honnold whose ascent of El Capitan without ropes was documented in Free Solo belie the concept of limits. Perhaps someone will one day actually fly, or arise from the morass of Democratic politics to triumph against the odds in 2020?