My joke for the last presidential election was; If you experience an election lasting more than four months, consult your physician immediately. But as much fun as it is to make jokes about electile dysfunction… and to rant about how stupid we are to let it get to the point where candidates can receive unlimited contributions and spend obscene amounts on lying to us, most of which comes from people who have their own agendas… this time I want to focus on how our system has created a whole mess of cookie-cutter, empty-suit talking heads that can’t have their own ideas or opinions because their handlers won’t let them, and we seem to like it that way.
The thing is… and this is a ‘thing’ that sort of scares the crap out of me… but these candidates aren’t real people.
The words they say were written by other people, and then those words were passed by focus groups and market tested and fine-tuned to be what will offend the least amount of us possible, while still carrying just enough clichés and talking points to appeal to the biggest target audience that candidate and his ‘people’ hope will vote for them. These candidates come off an assembly line.
They are products for sale to the American people, like bland TV dinners, with no flavor or nutritional substance. They are brands. And as brands, they count heavily on brand loyalty. Nobody wants to make the mistake the Coca-Cola company made when they took their main product.. which, ironically, had been using the slogan; ‘It’s the real thing’ and made it into New Coke… which evidentially wasn’t the real thing at all.
The candidates have every aspect of their personalities and wardrobes and facial expressions and hand gestures tested so that the color of the tie and the shine of the shoes and the size of the American flag pin are all safely within the parameters determined by these focus groups and paid experts.
They have become so worried about doing anything or saying anything that will make the endless news cycles in a bad way that they can’t really say anything at all… you remember, like when Sarah Palin was ‘ambushed’ into having to think of something she liked to read, and then ended up looking like an idiot for not being able to. How unfair was that? I mean, seriously, could you think up the name of like… any book or magazine ever printed… just on the spur of the moment like that? HA!
So what we end up with is people telling us what they know we want to hear, and nothing that they know we don’t want to hear. We never hear real ideas, or discussions on the tough issues or even important topics that we all know we need to think about but they aren’t on the top ten list, so why bother?
We get little, easy to remember chunks of issues… less taxes, more taxes, tax the rich, tax the poor, more troops to the Mideast, more troops home from the Mideast, more listening to our phone calls, less listening to our phone calls, and so on and so forth.
Yes, I can fix the economy, you just wait and see! And it isn’t like, when they do get into office, that they will actually be able to make any substantive changes anyway, because the system no longer works.
And the debates are just stupid. Nobody can tell you their plans for solving problems of this size and scale in the short bits of time they are allowed. Sure, they might get around to mentioning climate change or rebuilding the infrastructure for a minute or two, but there is no glamor in that, and we all swiftly move on.
Hey, we let it come to this. We haven’t insisted on lowering the amount of money they can rake in, or forced them to not make commercials containing out-and-out lies, or shortened the time the elections can take. We have become so used to the blandness than when an occasional candidate does speak his own mind, we all wonder if he has gone off the rails.
One small stumble can destroy a candidate’s chances, so we end up with not the best person for the job, but just the one who made the fewest mistakes or didn’t get caught making them.
Maybe we should be worrying more about how we elect our presidents and less about which one is slightly less flawed than their opponents, and therefore worthy of our vote… because another election is always coming… and before too much longer, people will start running for the next election the day after this one is over.
Pouring My Art Out 