Relaxant Needed To Watch Election
Let’s see, I’ve got my popcorn, some iced tea and a big vial of muscle relaxants. I guess I’m ready to watch another U.S. election.
It’s not like I’m a political junkie. My interest is rather more ghoulish than that. I’m into it strictly for the the bizarre spectacle, for the dizzying highs and terrifying lows. I just happen to be attracted to slow-motion car wrecks, that’s all.
Consider the byzantine electoral college system of determining the president. It makes Canadian parliamentary elections seem eminently practical. And then there are the crazy side-stories which reveal how many different ways Americans vote, or at least try to: levers, computers, early mail-in ballots, possibly smoke signals in some distant precincts.
I’ll bet you a steak dinner they’re still using chads somewhere.
There will also be, guaranteed, many stories about overcrowded polls and duly registered voters who are nonetheless denied a ballot, usually because of underhanded edicts by partisan hacks who somehow got local control of this whole insane quadrennial process.
Good times, good times.
I’ll never forget November 2000, watching with a couple of tuned-in buddies. When the network anchor declared that Florida, which had been called for Gore, was being dragged back into the undecided category, my friend responded instantly.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Here we go. Somewhere on a dark road in Dade County there’s a GMC Yukon with smoked-glass windows and a guy named Julio throwing boxes of votes into the swamp.”
It was a prescient comment, only slightly off the mark. It actually would have been Broward County.
I once got to witness a pivotal election right in the belly of the beast. That was Ronald Reagan’s breakout victory in 1980, which I watched in a bar on 6th Avenue in Manhattan. Granted, Jimmy Carter hadn’t enchanted the world, but there was a palpable sadness in that tavern when the Reagan landslide became apparent.
For many of us, Reagan was the original null entity, the sort of cipher we thought would have provided the low-water mark of presidential gravitas for all time. And it was, at least until Dubya came along.
Little did I know then, however, what an immediate and lasting effect the 1980 election would have. I got an inkling the next morning when I showed up for a pre-arranged meeting with an editor at the humour magazine, National Lampoon, where I’d written a few articles previously.
Back then the Lampoon’s editor in chief was the now well-known satirist, P.J. O’Rourke, who had always shared the leftish bent of the rest of the magazine. Yet everything changed on that day. In the 15 minutes I spent with sub-editor Ted Mann, his phone rang at least 10 times — all, apparently, buddies cuing up a hyper-ironic Reagan victory party.
Shortly thereafter, O’Rourke declared he was forming a new party, the Pants-Down Republicans. Before long he’d written its seminal manifesto, Republican Party Reptile, followed later by funny but scary books like Give War a Chance and its follow-up, Peace Kills.
Two decades later, and with a straight face, many Americans consider Ronald Reagan the greatest statesmen in their country’s history. They want to name important things after a guy who napped his way through most meetings he ever attended. This is, obviously, just one more thing I don’t understand about U.S. politics.
Still, I’ll be watching tomorrow. I don’t expect it to be any more comprehensible than kabuki theatre, although it will have its share of the unforeseen. It may be too late for a genuine October surprise, but I will be shocked indeed if something unpredictable and contentious does not occur.
Though I’m skeptical an Obama presidency would do much to bring the gigantic ship of state back on course, I will nevertheless be pulling for him. It’s about optics, at a minimum. Showing the world there’s been a break with the same gang of crazy old white guys can only help Brand America.
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