An Ode to President Lisa Simpson

Upon re-watching “Bart to the Future”, the seventeenth episode of The Simpsons‘ eleventh season not too long ago, the truth sunk in that we have been so shut to our first feminine president. Watching Lisa Simpson sitting within the oval workplace, the phrases of Adele’s “Rolling within the Deep” resounded in my head: we might have had all of it. A Lisa sitting in a purple go well with with pearls, equally donned by Vice President Harris at President Biden’s election in 2020 and who’s self-awareness got here to gentle when she quoted a Simpson episode as a part of her political endeavors, a clip of her during a Simpsons panel at SDCC last year was performed the place she quoted “We should transfer ahead, not backward, upward, not ahead, and at all times twirling, twirling, twirling in direction of freedom.” from “Treehouse of Horror VII”.

Granted one of many first issues of enterprise Lisa has to attend in “Bart to the Future”–the place Bart sees a imaginative and prescient of his, his household’s, and the nation’s future–is the debt we accrued from President Trump. A frankly tremendous throwaway line from the 12 months 2000 that nobody might have believed would come true, not to mention twice, which actually manifested itself. Alas, right here we’re, and outcomes have diversified each day on this dystopia. Satirically, Bart has a line that claims the US couldn’t deal with him because the president for being “too actual,” a line of opinion that appears to be going round lately. Future Bart might need extra in widespread with these in energy than he might have imagined. But when that’s a parallel we will draw with the reward of hindsight, it additionally raises one other query: what’s it going to take to see a Lisa Simpson in workplace?

Rising up alongside the present, Lisa has at all times been the voice of motive within the Simpsons household. The black sheep locally of center class neighbors, who symbolize all walks of life one might discover in any-town, America. The comedic episodes ful of foolish and infrequently questionable Springfieldian antics have been usually grounded by the empathy Lisa expressed for her fellow man, within the face of being very often misunderstood. She made sense of her mother and father, her erratic father, her overstressed high-functioning mom, her rebellious brother, and everybody round her, and infrequently did so to make them to return collectively and face no matter hardship they have been combating this week. From being an advocate for human and animal rights as a job mannequin for younger ladies, I actually put stake into her beliefs and starvation for information. And very similar to the cartoons earlier than it, in the best way that Looney Tunes launched many people to classical music and opera,  I discovered a lot about tradition I wouldn’t have wanted if not for the present, by means of Lisa’s eyes. Her Inform-tale Coronary heart “It’s the beating of that hideous coronary heart!” line supply in “Lisa’s Rival” lives lease free in my head and acquired me into Poe’s works. Even that episode, the place Lisa sabotaged a classmate’s venture to higher her personal possibilities, confirmed how irrespective of how good a child might try to be, they have been solely human and vulnerable to jealousy too. And let’s not overlook what somewhat heartbreaker she is, from Ralph’s “I Choo-choo-chose you” rejection, Milhouse’s pining to Nelson’s unlikely romance. Lisa Simpson will endlessly be that lady and maybe nobody might match her likes in animation historical past.

However now as I strategy the age of somebody who could possibly be a president, the attract of a determine exemplifying the beliefs Lisa did in our personal larger workplace stays, decades-old prescient episodes of the present or not. Lisa’s compassion her sense of justice and injustice, her willingness to get caught in and cope with the messes laid out forward of her, and the love she had for her household and group, are broad beliefs befitting the best workplace of all of them on this nation. And whereas the information, nevertheless outrageous, continues to shock and dismay us each day, and it has nonetheless has me considering again to a different change in “Bart to the Future”,  the place Homer says, “What a bleak and horrible future we dwell in!” just for Bart to reply “Don’t you imply “current”?”

Certain, that’s the place we’re proper now, however I’d wish to assume we’re nonetheless ready for the President Lisa Simpson on the horizon–and that she could possibly be any one in every of us.

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