I’ve been listening a lot recently to the radio and reading the news and eavesdropping on conversations in the locker room at my gym… there’s an election going on in America, you know. It’s fascinating stuff (not quite as fascinating and as important as the Superbowl, but we don’t like to talk about that in New England any more). I’m not all that familiar with politics, but I thought that I’d explain what I know…
There’s an election about to happen.
Well, not actually an ‘election’ as yet… just the lead-up to an election. So that’s all straightforward, right? There is a ‘good’ party and a ‘bad’ party. The people in the ‘good’ party think that they are right and that the other people in the ‘bad’ party are, obviously, wrong…. about everything, ok. The details really aren’t that important – the other people are just wrong.
OK, I will admit that it’s a little bit more complicated than that. Because the people in the same party, who all agree that broadly they believe the same thing which is, most importantly, different to the things that the other party believe in, don’t actually agree with one another. So, there are two levels of disagreement going on. The big disagreements with the other party (a bit like disagreeing with the way that the Smiths who live across the road have landscaped their garden) and the smaller, let’s call them meta-level, disagreements within one’s own party (a bit like the disagreements over where the vegetable patch should go in one’s own garden and finding out who over-pruned the climbing hydrangea last season).
I feel a bit like I'm watching a dysfunctional family on the verge of a melt-down. But the main difference is that rather than discretely ripping one another to pieces in the privacy of their own backyard, they are allowing the entire world to watch the process. No-one is really interested in the ‘Smiths’ across the road; no, it’s what goes on within one’s own family (party) that counts and they’re going to expend all their time and money proving that other family members are wrong. Imagine, if you will, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to prove that your younger brother shouldn’t have pruned that particular bit of the yew tree and that your older brother once said, even though he denies it now, that he liked daffodils. (For the sake of the analogy, I have used poetic license with the figures: the Wall Street Journal actually estimated that Republican candidates had spent $23.5million on television ads by the beginning of February 2012. This has not been an ideological media campaign which provides enlightenment around the party’s philosophies and vision for the future. This has not been an attempt to speak truth to the electorate or, more pragmatically, to speak truth to those who are not really very likely to vote, but have their own television sets. This campaign has focused on the really important stuff – trying to prove that one candidate within the party is better than another by ridiculing what they might have, but probably didn’t, say.)
Of course, my analogy is poor. It’s meant to be. It’s as poor as the advertising campaigns that don’t really help to provide information about what the candidates actually believe in, or as poor as the memory of some candidates who lie brazenly about things that they have been documented as saying, or as poor as the personal morals of some of the candidates. To talk about the real, actual stuff would be too horrific. As one woman said in the gym, ‘We have to talk about it in terms of the Grand Old Party and the Tea Party because it sounds so much better than saying ‘a bunch of racist, sexist, homophobic, right wing reactionary bigots with no sense of history, morality, or fairness.’’
But maybe we’ve just blown it all out of proportion. As a radio commentator explained to me last week, in a year’s time we’ll be watching the latest president sitting miserably in the White House wearing a tee-shirt which reads, ‘I spent $57billion coming to Washington and all I got was this lousy congress’.
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