Wake Me When It’s Over

Well boys and girls, the calendar tells us that Election Day is almost here. Yippee! Hurrah! Be still my palpitating heart! Has it really been just two years since a couple of dozen sadomasochistic men and women decided to throw their hats into the proverbial Presidential ring? It seems like an eon. Time sure flies when you’re having fun eh? We’ve been fed a steady diet of hyperbolical politispeak for the past twenty-four months. (Spelling the time frame out is much more impressive than just the number 24.) We’ve weeded out the also-rans, and now there are two. Now that we’re in the home stretch you can turn on your television anytime of the day or night, and if you watch network programming for more than twenty-five minutes at a clip you’re bound to be treated to an advertisement touting Barack Obama (or a snipe at McCain); and with any luck you’ll get the double whammy and get a John McCain (or anti-Obama) ad for good measure. Maybe even back to back! Isn’t that exciting! I don’t know about you, but I’m over it, Finis, kaput, done, fried. Can we please move on?
Let’s cover the positive aspect of this overblown, overstated, overindulgent hoopla. Since the target audience is the same, and they air during the same broadcasts; all these political ads have taken valuable airtime away from pharmaceutical companies touting their never ending stream of things we MUST ask our doctors about. Our high cholesterol, high blood pressure, our obesity (you know who you are), our erectile dysfunction, depression (if you are male wouldn’t those two go hand in hand?), our restless leg syndrome, allergies, diabetes, chronic dry eye, acid reflux, insomnia, brittle bones, low calcium, and the all important benign prostatic hypertrophy.
These ads offer a multitude of things we can take to alleviate any of the aforementioned maladies, and some that weren’t mentioned. Pharmaceutical giants shill everything from Avodart and Flomax for our plumbing, Lipitor, Crestor, Zetia, and Zocor will assuage our heart and cholesterol concerns. Astilin and Zyrtec will allow us to breathe easier so to speak. Prevacid, Nexium, Tagamet, and Prilosec bombard our gullets, and Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra keep us erect, unless it’s for more than four hours, then we get thee to a nunnery, I mean doctor. See, due to the final campaign crunch we can be thankful we’re granted a diversion from what should be ailing all of us. Just substituting one craneal poison for another I guess.
Personally, I can truly relate to Malcolm McDowell’s character in A Clockwork Orange when he’s forced to watch television hours on end. Is there a real need for all these campaign ads? After all these months of nightly news coverage of the two candidates, innumerable sources of measured, pertinent information on the issues; is there a voter out there that needs to see just one more political advertisement to persuade him to vote one way or the other? If there is I don’t want that asshole canceling out my carefully researched and thought through vote. Yet there is no medication to help me stomach the eternal political drivel.
Why can’t the candidates say something profound? Something that makes us take pause like JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country;” or FDR’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That’s shit that you can rally around. It’s immaterial that speechwriters probably came up with both of those gems; they were lines that you could sink your teeth into. What do we get?
We get Sarah Palin’s response to a third graders question concerning the duties of the Vice-President. She informed her audience that in addition to supporting the policies of the President, the Vice-President “is in charge of the Senate.” Interesting. Maybe she looked that up on Wilkipedia, before someone corrected that erroneous entry. From what I understand, the Vice-President serves as President of the Senate, formally presiding over Senate deliberations. The role is so limited that the Vice-President rarely comes to the chamber, unless there is a tie vote on bills and resolutions, and then the Vice-President gets to cast the deciding vote. To me that’s a far cry from “in charge of the Senate.” Someday, further along in that child’s educational process perhaps he/she will be enlightened as to the real role the Vice-President plays in regard to the Senate. For now, that child should file Palin’s answer somewhere in the darkest recess of their mind, never to be summoned forth when queried. Palin should heed the advice of Abraham Lincoln, “ ‘tis better to remain silent and thought a fool, than speak and remove all doubt.”
Barack Obama can’t seem to grab that elusive brass ring of quotable wisdom either. He recently stirred a crowd when referencing the current economic crisis by saying “Times like these call for the best ideas and the brightest minds…” like we need to be reminded of that. Really? No, we want dipshits and halfwits to tackle the fiscal woes the country is mired in.
So come on all you “fence-sitters,” let’s watch more TV! They’ll be running campaign ads for the next two weeks! This is your last chance to be persuaded. Is there a pill for constipation of the brain?