Vacuities Conquer All

Mrs. Clinton showing too much cleavage? Other Democratic presidential candidates jealous because they have no cleavage–nothing worth bragging about at least?

Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who can pussyfoot around in flip-flops, is he ever going to reveal all about Mormonism?

Did Dennis Kucinich, the only real liberal slavering for the kiss of the Democrats, accept a packet of soynuts and an Intergalactic Dr. Pepper from crew member on the flying saucer Kucinich approached?

Reporters assigned to the living hell of covering and traveling with presidential campaigns know how boring their job is, especially to such highly educated, sensitive souls as themselves, suffering hangovers for the good of humanity.

The candidates say the same thing over and over. The essence of the news business is to find news–something new.

Thus when the cleavage of the only woman candidate for the presidency receives mention during spin by other candidates and their staffers, that’s news, compared say, with Kucinich’s trenchant but politically hopeless yawners about the sins of G. W. Bush and his flunkies.

So if a few reporters wheezing along the campaign trail seize on Hillary’s cleavage and the criticism thereof as the hot lead to shovel off to thick headed assistant national-desk editors who just refused to OK their expense-account bar bills, then suddenly the nation rivets on accounts of how much breast work a female candidate may or should show without opening herself to charges she is pandering to (1) the female vote or (2) the male vote.

If the story flows from the laptop of an Associated Press reporter, or if an A.P. rewrite soul picks up the cleavage story, this major question facing the fate of the nation suddenly races around the country and the world. Those campaign reporters who did not favor their betters with a piece on the subject feel their cell phones jingle with irate calls from their masters, demanding to know, where is our bosoms story?

If a poor sod on the campaign bus tells her editor, geez, that’s not news, the wax gets reamed out of her ear by her boss saying, the wires have it, or the competition has it, or CBS is leading the news with it, or The New York Times thinks it’s news: Don’t argue, write me a tits story and if you want, dress it up with the women’s angle, OK? Oh, your think piece about Obama’s thumbsucking over global warming, it didn’t make the cut for tomorrow’s paper. It’s in holdover, and we’ll see. Now give us 200 (words) on Clinton’s cleavage. You’ve got 20 minutes.

So inconsequentials become news, to titillate the imaginations of millions of Americans vaguely pondering which of these candidates I can tolerate enough to vote for–if I vote at all.

Now that the presidential campaign stretches in time out to absurdity, causing more and more political reporters to watch their sanities and livers shrivel, we can drool in anticipation of reports on how X charmed a manure spreader in Liverspot, IA, or how Y attacked Z for chewing Red Man tobacco during a debate before the assembled Doukhobors of Squat Swamp, NH.

As has been noted, Rome wasn’t ruined in a day.