It’s been a while, so let’s catch up: got cancer for Christmas (whoopee!), and then a New Year lumpectomy, followed by Valentine’s Day chemo. Coming up later this year – Fourth of July radiation, in which I’ll get beamed up by the mother-ship.
Enough of that. Back to another story already in progress.
I’m sure you’ve wondered why I haven’t weighed in on all the twisted tales being told daily – even hourly – by all sides of the current political race. All sides in that sense including the candidates, the flacks, the mainstream press, and “new media”, a/k/a the blogosphere.
The answer there? Exhaustion, pure and simple.
Back inna day, when political noise emanated from just the campaigns and the mainstream press, I thought there were way too many words being used to describe way too little real thought or policy. Adding the chorus of new media voices to that dissonant opera has done…what, exactly? At best, it gives every possible view the opportunity to have its champion, particularly on the media side. At worst, it confuses the hell out of everybody.
This reflects the scattered political landscape this country – and any democracy – has, whatever tidy little bundles history books try to make out of the American past. For every issue: fetal rights, fetal pig rights, gay rights, “sanctity of marriage” rights (that’s got to be a joke, considering the divorce rate in the U.S.?), education, dedicated ignorance (a/k/a “teaching creationism”), there is a candidate that will meet your needs.
Once you pick one…is he, or she, electable? That’s what this long, muddy slog toward the first Tuesday in November is purportedly about. I have to admit, though, that as I watch this horse race, I’m thinking less Lincoln, “To give victory to the right, not bloody bullets, but peaceful ballots only, are necessary”, more Barnum, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
