The Exquisite Corpse of American Politics
The mortal danger of missing the bigger picture.
There’s an old parlor game from the early 1900s.
It’s called exquisite corpse.
It became popular in French cafes in the 1930s. Sometimes it’s called “consequences.” The game asked players to collaborate on a drawing. There was only one big rule. Each player couldn’t see what the previous one had drawn. They hid their part of the drawing by covering it up or folding it over.
Sometimes, the players wrote a short story or a poem instead of drawing a picture. You could make whatever you wanted. The main point was that nobody saw the bigger picture until the end of the game.
Eventually, the Surrealists adopted this game as a formal technique. It helped artists and writers think outside the box.
It gave them strange ideas.
When it comes to politics now, the exquisite corpse doesn’t offer inspiration so much as a window into our current crisis.
In every movement and political party these days, everyone sees their own small part of the bigger project. Some…