Last week Larry David and other commentators on the Huffington Post lamented how long this campaign was taking, and how they wanted the election over with. I’m sympathetic to the adverse health effects that anxiety, anticipation and Sarah Palin’s voice may be having on people. I can also commiserate that my own work output has been reduced to a trickle trying to keep up with the latest news and polls. The productivity gains the internet has given us, the internet shall taketh away.
But do I want this campaign over next week? Hell no. Have you taken a moment to consider how much free entertainment has been contained in the daily news cycle since the end of August? Do you realize that just last week, from Monday through Friday, we got enjoy stories about:
• Minnesota’s Senator Bachman trying to explain away her out-of-body channeling of Joe McCarthy;
• Sarah Palin’s $150,000 shopping spree, which was only revealed last Wednesday (think how far that kind of money would go in a consignment shop!)
• Ashley Todd’s self-assault at the ATM (Oh, how much longer the lie could’ve been strung along if she’d only learned how to write backwards!)
That’s just from the everyday news. It doesn’t include the backbiting and Dr. Scholl salads that the conservative talking heads endured on the cable chat shows. That has been entertainment of a rare caliber. As fewer and fewer commentators will defend the McCain-Palin campaign, the news shows have had to move further and further down the pecking order for Republican “strategists” and “observers” to interview. If this campaign went on for another month, we’d get to see a tattoo-parlor owner from Idaho wired up and telling “Fox & Friends” all he knows about socialism.
If these stories give a person too much agita, I suggest they cowboy up and deal with it. Take to drinking if you have to. Because these developments are necessary, vital, even healthful. The Republican Party has spent the past 25 years getting elected by mixing race, religion and class consciousness into a fear cocktail to keep their faithful out and voting. While the Republicans have spouted about lower taxes, smaller government, and a “humble” foreign policy stance, they’ve done their best to ignore all three. Now they are reaping the results of the lies they’ve sown and the stupid ideas they’ve espoused. Such a process takes time.
Maybe I’m ODing on the schadenfreude, but I say, keep it coming. A couple more months, at least, so that we can see every hypocrisy and dirty deal exposed in the open air. I want to hear more filth about everything: John McCain’s secret deals with al-Qaeda, Sarah Palin’s plastic surgeries (which she will promise to undo or auction to charity later), Todd Palin’s clandestine Inuit love igloo that he visited on long snow-machine races.
I want to see Nancy Pfotenhauer snap on camera and take a bite out of someone’s neck. I want to watch William Kristol melt into a puddle of blame-dodging ooze. I want to learn about a Robo-call accusing Obama of laughing in the past at Flip Wilson’s “Rev. Leroy and the Church of What’s Happenin’ Now” routine. I want to hear Limbaugh actually use a phrase like “Hide your women” or “the sanctity of our precious bodily fluids”.
I want to see all of this for the same reason Van Helsing wanted to be the one to drive the stake through Dracula’s heart, because it’s the only way I’ll be certain that the reputations of these people and the policies of unbridled conservatism are dead. Deader than dead. Dead and buried under Yucca Mountain with radioactive garlic strung around their necks dead.
Because you know when this is over, the news for at least the next ten weeks is going to be about plant closings, foreclosures, and how no one will be able to afford to buy holiday presents this year. That’s the harsh truth, beyond any paranoid fantasies about October surprises or the GOP stealing the election again.
The family took in a preview of the new exhibit at the Field Museum last week, and had a terrific time. “Darwin” is a thorough profile of the shaggy naturalist who laid the bedrock of modern biological science with his “On the Origin of Species.” I heartily endorse the show, which runs through January 1. You’ll come away with it with a new appreciation of how hard he worked at what he loved, and how his inescapable conclusions about evolution gave him incredible grief (weakened his own faith, threatened his marriage).