Friday, December 2, 2016

The Face of Trump

Pareidolia, we do so love you here at Augoeides. For anybody unfamiliar with the term, pareidolia describes the tendency of our minds to see human-like faces in the patterns of ordinary objects. The most famous of these, of course, involve seeing the face of Jesus in all sorts of odd places, stories that I've been covering for years.

But today, Huffington Post is reporting on a British woman preparing chili who saw a much more sinister face when she cut open a red pepper, a face perfectly suited to the current American political conversation - the screaming face of Donald Trump.

A woman in southern England was slicing up a red bell pepper when she spotted what she said was the image of President-elect Donald Trump screaming straight back at her.

“A discussion about Trump and the state of the world was going on while the veg was being sliced up,” Janet Ayers told The Register. “It was as if the pepper was mirroring the conversation.”

Ayers posted a photograph of her curious find to Facebook on Nov. 26, and it’s now setting the British media abuzz.

The image appears above, and while funny, it does highlight an interesting point. Prior to all the media exposure generated by Trump's presidential campaign, would anyone have noticed the resemblance? Jesus is a popular figure in majority Catholic countries because Catholic lore allows for the images of Jesus, Mary, and hardly anybody else to appear all over the place. So if anybody sees a face, they figure it has to be Jesus. And let me tell you, some of those images look like totally generic faces and don't really resemble renderings of Jesus at all.

The media outlets have been fixated on Trump as he assembles his administration, prompting the conversation about him - which is probably really what triggered the identification. Meanwhile, you think that it looks like Trump because I just told you it was in the headline, before you had a chance to process the image. But that's exactly how it works, and why this pepper totally wants to make chili great again.

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