The Horror of It, The Horror Of It

During a recent battle with the grippe, which I won ( I think, one can never be sure at my age), I horrified myself with the feverish realization that the citizens of this great country will spend at least half their time from now on listening to–or trying to avoid listening to–the blather of candidates for president.

I horrified myself further by thinking that since this is the nation of wretched excess, there is no guarantee that this year’s two-year overt campaign may not metamorphose (morph, you all) into a three-year campaign and after that a four-year campaign.

My god, I thought, by the time my grandchildren are 40–thankfully, I’ll be dead by then-- the presidential campaign, complete with endless empty news reports and the belches and flatulences of radio and TV blowhards, may go on every day, night and day. Kurtz had it easy.

When I first came to awareness of presidential politics, as it had for nearly a century and a half, the presidential campaign started in the fall–call it two-and-a-half months long.

Our predecessors under this onerous limitation on speeches–in a time when newspapers, magazines, letters, word of mouth and much later radio and newsreels were the chief means of communication–managed to elect George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Mason, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, to mention the best.

We, with communications endless evolving toward the infinite, have let the election system mushroom into two years of extravagant spending and stupefying rhetoric and worse: The opportunity for weird folk hardly anyone had ever heard of shove themselves upon us as they run to preside over the United States and, by default, much of the otherwise world.

Most of the people who now turn out to become president hardly qualify to give a talk at a small-town Rotary. But we have to hear them and read about them, as more and more as the months go by the press magnifies them into important people. Individually we finally latch on to one to vote for, generally because this yahoo is one of ours--Democrat, Republican, vegetarian, nose-picker, whatever. We finally cheer for one because he or she is like a member of our high-school basketball team made up of over-testosteroned (both sexes) persons often of small intelligence but good reflexes. We end up shouting “Our Tribe Uber Alles!” and accordingly vote.

But to be jabbered at these people for half the waking days our lives? Or more? Forevermore?

Spare us, Oh, Lord!”

Obama Won't Get Snopes' Vote

Barack Obama’s win in the Iowa Democratic caucuses has triggered chatter in the national press, especially in The New Times, that his victory shows that in a state predominately white a black can garner white votes.

The commentary has its interests. First, note that Obama, though half white in origin, classifies as black in white and other eyes because he is half black. Indeed, for whites and even for blacks and other minorities, any genes that tint the skin automatically make you whatever that tint is. This prejudice applies with mathematical considerations to American Indians. The federal government through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and though federally recognized tribes sets all kinds of percentages on what makes one an Indian qualifying for tribal membership and any monetary or other benefits that may attend. I have met tribal leaders with white skins, blue eyes, red hair and last names deriving from Vikings but with an Indian progenitor to trump as far as classification goes.

In Obama’s case, he won among those recruited and otherwise who came to Democratic caucuses to vote for him. Many of these were liberals, for whom racial prejudice amounts to two dirty words.

That’s good, but not good enough to support a claim that his victory among them indicates that white Americans in general will not let racial prejudice color their final decision about him or any other black. Indeed, in Obama’s case, if he becomes the Democratic nominee, the Republican dirty politics propaganda machine will spend many millions sandpapering the body politic with reminders, overt and subvert, that Obama is well, you know, a. . .(whisper, whisper, whisper).
I can’t shed my cynicism that Obama through charm and education and culture will fail to overcome the rampant racial prejudice in the U.S. of A.

If he had just won a primary vote in, say, Alabama or Mississippi, my mind might change. I await the first such vote below the Mason-Dixon Line to see who voted for him, and who against. I hunch he won’t get much of the Snopes’ vote.