Sometimes Truth Can Be More Unbelievable Than Fiction

 

In the early 1960s Rod Sterling created a social phenomenon of a TV show called The Twilight Zone. The premise of the show was that individuals would find themselves entangled in extraordinarily unbelievable situations. They were in the “twilight zone” trying to extricate themselves from a mind-bending quagmire of fantasy they could never have imagined becoming reality. But it had.

It has been over 50 years since the last episode of The Twilight Zone was broadcast, but it has been reprised as a live “reality show” that is called the United States House of Representatives.

Rod Sterling was creative but …

As creative as he was. even Rod Sterling would have been hesitant to suggest a scenario where 8 Republican Representatives could “out vote” 210 of their Republican colleagues to oust their leader Kevin McCarthy, pushing the House of Representatives into a real life “twilight zone.” But unlike Sterling’s stories, this was fact not fiction. But this was not the end of the show or even a commercial break.

Acting against one’s own self-interests is not a crime but …

The House Republicans willingly “walked the last mile” moving the House from crippling conflict to catastrophic chaos. (The Democrat minority resisted preventing the Republicans from “eating their own” and simply sat back to watch the show.) The Republicans fell deeper into their twilight zone by admitting, that once the deed was done, the doers were undone because they had no consensus as to who should lead them out of their self-created political crevasse.

This caused the House Republicans to fall even deeper into the abyss of fiction when some suggested that the devil incarnate – Donald Trump – should be elected as House Speaker. (And, even more unbelievably he indicated openness to the idea.) Trump then added to the feeling of a true twilight zone when he bypassed Republican members and jumped into the fray by endorsing his own Lucifer – Jim Jordan – as the leader.

The story is not over yet, but like Rod Sterling’s episodes, we won’t know the end until the end. And even then we may be left in our own twilight zone with a lot of head scratching; wondering why and what just happened.

And the bottom line is ..

Rod Sterling was free to make up any unbelievable situations that came to his fertile mind because it was all fiction, but in real life you just can’t make this s—t up.       

                                                ###

Bob MacDonald -- Former president and CEO of ITT Life, founder of LifeUSA, retired chairman and CEO of Allianz Life of North America, author of a number of books on leadership, management and business. Contact: bobmac5201@gmail.com 


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