Political Steroids

Up here in Canada, the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives (or whatever they’re currently called) are both threatening to make an election happen. So strange to have it not be a regular kind of thing. On the other hand, so wonderful to have it occur of a sudden with only a relatively few weeks allowed for the campaign. So unlike the current and dreadful election in the U.S, which seems to have been going on for most of my adult life.

This week is really one of the times I’m particularly grateful to have broken the TV habit. I actually do have a TV set in the Canada house, but I never think to turn it on to TV: it’s just there as a way to watch DVD’s. So, I am managing to miss both the Olympics and the Democratic Party Convention. Two of a kind: Did the U.S. win? Did the Chinese win? Do I care? I’m actually pretty enthusiastic when some Somali or Jamaican runner wipes everyone out. Just what the big nations deserve, I’d say. Bob Barr is looking interesting; even Ralph Nader is beginning to come in for some sympathy.

The Olympics, I guess is actually over now, but the Democrats are just beginning so I could give it a try yet. But, but, but…I imagine turning on, say, NBC (our basic cable does not offer CNN), and I can know only too well what I’d be seeing and it wouldn’t be Adlai Stevenson giving a smart, funny, and informative speech that made you understand what politics was about and why you ought to be paying attention to it. Instead, whoever is giving whatever speech will (on Monday afternoon) be far away in the background while some brag of pundits maunder on about the kinds of things that the rest of us quit thinking and talking about when we got out of high school.

Pundits! Did we used to have that word? Let alone have those tiresome people with their repetitive thought syndrome? Do they ever appear alone, or are they always in groups? What is their attraction and why do they breed so rapidly without having attraction? It will only be minutes before they start discussing what Hillary is wearing and whether it means Too Much Hillary or Not Enough Hillary. Or, I guess, because it’s Monday, they will be discussing what Michelle is wearing and what it really truly tells us about just how angry she is. I, myself, appear almost always in black slacks, black turtle neck, and red silk shirt, and if that tells you just how angry I am, then my message is getting across. I hope Michelle will be wearing black and red. She deserves to be angry for the way in which she is being trivialized by this process.

It seems to me that the political class (which includes the politicians, their managers, their hangers-on, the sycophantic press, the pollsters, the pundits, and lobbyists) has finally achieved what I would have thought impossible. They have turned me off politics. They can have it all to themselves, as far as I am concerned. Maybe that’s what they always wanted, of course. So, I’ll keep watching them if only from a greater and greater distance. Surely I won’t be watching their faux competitions, but I will be wondering why anyone else is.

Modern politics in the U.S. is a true rival for the Disneyland pageantry of the Olympics: if only there were rules about the use of steroids or the political equivalent thereof, we could have regular truth tests, or even brain cell testing, and thought specimens would be collected after every race. And then there would be hearings in Congress where last week’s winner could swear he only played by the rules, never took those political steroids. But we’d know better. They’re all on political steroids.