Tilt

Remember pinball machines?  Before video games, bars, arcades, pizza joints and all sorts of places had them.  You shot a little steel ball up the side and then tried to hit as many bumpers and targets as you could by batting that little ball with flippers at the bottom, controlled by buttons on the side.  You could also nudge the whole machine if you had the strength and touch required, but you had to be careful not to nudge it too much or else it would shut down and flash the message "TILT" across the scoreboard, which means you just cheated and that shot is done.
They used to use tilt signs in old cartoons too, when a character would get beat up to an absurd degree, tilt would appear in his eyes or on a little sign above his head, as a sign that things had just gone too far.  I never really understood what exactly that meant until I started lurking around pinball machines, which by that point were sort of retro and decidedly a vanishing symbol of the analog age (I suppose Sylvester and Wile E. Coyote are too).  Cheating video games is part of the show.  A lot of people my age can sort of do the Konami code in their sleep (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B,A), and those of us who played Doom on the PC will remember what IDKFA gets you.  Video games have embraced the cheating to a large extent and allow user patches and toy around with easter eggs and various glitches that give people with way too much time on their hands something to do.  It's curious to be sure.
But I wonder if, when it comes to politics and our national dialogue, whether or not we need to bring back the tilt device.  I don't know if there is any other solution in this age of "truthiness," (thank you Stephen Colbert).  It occurs to me that we need some way to tell when politicians are crossing the veracity/prevarication line.  This is complicated by the fact that we tend to disbelieve people who say things that challenge our worldview and assumptions.  For instance, when Hilary Clinton answers questions about Benghazi, Republican types assume she's lying, and no amount of fact checking is going to convince them otherwise.  The media is biased, the fact checkers are also the media, there's been a cover up, you get the idea. In the current political climate our tilt mechanism seems to be set a bit too stiff, and the amount of untruth and truthiness we tolerate is usually way too high for those we agree with, and we are not willing to hear things that challenge our position.
When Bill Clinton got caught diddling a young intern, he did all kinds of shimmying and adjustment to avoid the simple fact that he was a very naughty boy.  Democrats pretty much gave him a pass in the end, not because they're okay with a married POTUS fooling around with a woman half his age, but because they really didn't want to admit that their saxophone playing slick willy was somehow wrong.  When Clinton testified in front of congress, challenging the definition of the word "is" our cultural tilt mechanisms went off.  The Bush-Cheney quest for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq set it off as well, but it was too late by that point.
I think maybe the immigration (of Muslims and Mexicans) issues are close to setting it off if they have not already.  I also think maybe the gun control debate is at a bit of a tilting point.  But here's the problem, I'm not sure either one of them is going to stop the game.  They both should, they should be causing us to shut down and re-think the strategy that brought us to this point.  A malfunctioning tilt device allows us to continue to play the game in an unethical manner, which is morally wrong, and furthermore initiates us into dangerously un-self-aware patterns of behavior.  In other words we think that we can just ignore the rules of truth and logic, even at the cost of lives and our own souls, as long as the score keeps going up.
In the past week or so, I think Donald Trump, and to a slightly lesser extent Ted Cruz, have been testing our tilt device.  Trump has said things that are so outlandish and brash that they even startle people who generally agree with his uber-capitalist dogma. It has come out that most of the GOP genuinely dislikes Cruz for being obstructionist and generally priggish.  Republican stalwarts like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice have expressed dismay at what can pretty aptly be described as the radicalization of the GOP and the general Bizzarro world values of Cruz and Trump have prompted fairly supportable theories that neither one of them expects or even wants to win the Presidency, they are just iconoclasts who desire to tear down everything, including their own GOP.
They both seem dead set on destroying the established order, but I have yet to get a grip on what they would propose in it's place.  Bernie Sanders has a bit of the iconoclastic ethos about him as well, but he has done a better job of framing his proposed alternatives to the current plutocracy.  Admittedly, my own personal convictions lean in the direction of democratic socialism.  To me, Sanders makes sense, but I can see where his approach might also set off the tilt alarm.  I have been watching Bernie carefully over these past months, expecting him to try something sketchy, but he has not, in fact he appears to be playing the game on the up and up.
I feel like we need someone who can play the game without tilting.  POTUS is not a Monarch or a Fascist dictator, no matter what you might have heard on Rush Limbaugh.  Obama's presidency has shown us rather distinctly the serious limits that our system places on our Commander in Chief.  The Constitution of these United States has a hell of a tilt meter, which is probably why we've made it this far.  I get the feeling though that we're on the verge of setting it off.