Politics scare me. Badly. Anyone who’s followed my illustrious journalism career as closely as I have may notice that authority gets me really nervy. I don’t like the idea of power being held by people with more power than me, especially since my only chance of fighting their power is with the rights they allow me to have. That strike anyone else as a bit weird, or am I out of line?
It wouldn’t be so bad if it was on a smaller scale. When my ancestor’s made the democracy that you all love so much, it was a few thousand people, a few hundred representatives, and everybody had to serve their time, like jury duty. Flat out, it was easier. That’s a fact, and it takes a lot for me to admit that anything in the past was better than we have it today, but politics is one of them.
If a homeless man came up to your face and asked you for a dollar, most people don’t give anything. But politics is the activity of throwing control for the next 4 years of your life over to someone you’ve never met. You don’t know them, you’re lucky to touch them, and tomorrow they could decide to hold your sister down and rip her uterus out using your tax dollars. There’d be checks and balances, things of that nature I’m embarrassingly retarded on, but they have the tools, they have the technology, and they’d be in charge of anyone you would call to try and stop them. I have best friends that I wouldn’t trust with my sister’s uterus.
For the sake of the people I love, specifically all of you, me, and my family, I’ve been meaning to try following this election process and write about it. Yes, thank you, I noticed it started a while ago. I’ve spent all this time trying to get a handle on it. I literally had no leverage, no crowbar on the door. I’ve been soaking here in total confusion and paranoia, for months now. I’ve asked so many people where I can start paying attention to politics, to try and start putting it all together, and I haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer yet. More than a few good ones, but nothing to make it all fall in to place and give me a starting point. It’s actually the same thought-process that got me to the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in the first place—I threw out every pamphlet that came in the mail from colleges, and never visited a web site to research. My logic being, “Well, they’re talking about themselves, so they’re obviously not going to be honest. Fuck them.” I only took EC because my mother started weeping that I’d get killed in Iraq if I wasn’t enrolled somewhere soon, so I took the cheapest one I could farthest from home that had accepted me. When someone talks about their candidate, they’re only giving me the good. What they don’t understand is I feel so much more at ease when I get bad news. No chance of getting blindsided.
I didn’t know what to know. Everything out of someone’s mouth was up for suspicion. Before I knew I could trust CNN, I would have to read the ad revenue, see where their funding was coming from, what monetary gain they would get from presenting this story, saying this about that candidate…I would have to actually see an economic conflict of interests—if they were funded by friends of Candidate A and gave a gleaming review of a Candidate B speech for instance—before I’d believe it. Can you imagine what that’s like?
And in the long-view, I still feel saner than a lot of people around me. I don’t cheer at the TV on Primary Tuesdays. I have to get drunk just to stay in proximity to those kinds of people. And that’s no way to cover politics. You can’t get blitzed until it goes away. It’s not going away. It never will. It’s the art of ambition, it’s made up of people who want power, and those people will always be around. Not even a dystopian population of coked out potheads with no arms and legs is going to be without those kinds of people. This race will have a direct effect on you and everything you do for the next 4 years, and when they’re done there’s going to be another one. Even if you want to run mountain-man and anarchize your life from cradle to grave, it’s still a round world. They will still affect how much fun your little back-packing adventure will end up being, how many obstacles they put in your way out of town. Your last choice now is how much you want to try to rein in the bull. It’s already been in the China shop for 232 years.
What are your options? Who knows. I don’t really think there’s anything for us to do, that’s the problem. I know people who went on 5 hours sleep a night for weeks leading up to the Wisconsin Primary. They’re a small honorable minority. And out of those, I’d bet that there’s an even smaller number of people who really educated themselves enough to make an informed decision on who they’re grassrooting for. As in knows what is good and bad about everyone, and threw their hat in with someone whose margin of difference matched theirs. I have a bad feeling that there’s a lot of very skilled cheerleaders. No better than a TV screamer, just with closer seats.
But to despair is the ultimate sin. I knew someone with my…blazing intellect could find a back door here. What hasn’t been covered yet? What angle is waiting for me? Arrogant, I know. The idea that everything of everything has been taken, staked, and claimed except for one spot just right waiting for me? Shows what kind of fool I am, right? It kind of hit me, though. The thing I’m good at, the thing no one else ever does, is the only chance I have of breaking this thing down into digestible microwave dinner squares. I know I’m not the only person who has no idea what the fuck is going on here, but I think I am the only one to admit it.
A good dear friend keeps calling me Post-Modern, intended as an insult. He thinks I see every side of every issue so much that I have no stand on anything. That I have no opinion of female genital mutilation or evil shit like that. He tries to rope me into admitting that I don’t care about anything. What he doesn’t get is that I know how wrong human history has been about things before. My job, not just as a writer no one reads, pays, or listens to, but as a damn philosopher, is to find the things that do not change when you cross a border. They’re next to impossible to find, but that’s not the same as impossible, or non-existent. He mistakes my patience, my endless patience, as apathy. But apathy doesn’t break a chair over watching democracy getting shit on. That it was a chair at his house at the time just made it ironic.
Combine that with my enjoyment at watching people fail, in this instance, newscasters. I mean really stick their foot in their mouths. Every one seems so amped to be the first one to call results for someone, they’re actually making the calls before the voting has even started? If I don’t say anything unless I’m absolutely sure it’s a fact, I’m prime to really bring a revolution in political reporting, huh?
I always wonder why I fuck around with things way beyond my present comprehension. I don’t just shoot for the stars. I say “Fuck off” to NASA and try to jump there myself. I bash my head into a wall and tell myself I don’t bleed. If I’d just sit down and trust someone else’s advice, my life would be so much easier. I’d be something with a brain, not a fucking pile of straw that just knows how to type. But as long as you can, you should always bite off more than you can chew. I think it’s one of the best things you can do with your life. I have to prove that I have something to offer here, now, in what might be the greatest political race of ours lives. This time when people might actually vote for someone, for Obama, instead of just against a Republican. Either that, or he might just be the greatest swindle in presidential history. I haven’t made up my mind yet, but one or the other is definitely going to happen by the end of all this. I have to keep my eyes peeled until way past when it feels like my lids might be bleeding. I have to be there. I was born now. That means I elbow up to the front row to the best of my ability. Being alive, that’s my duty.
So here’s the first and last lesson, kids: The only way we’re going to get anywhere from here is by admitting we might be wrong and investigating accordingly. I’m definitely sure of that one.
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