I suppose I can hold out for two more days.In the meantime, I won’t answer the phone to explain for the 35th time who I am going to vote for, who I won’t vote for, or how my vote is none of their goddamn business in the first place. I’ll keep moving the campaign mail, unopened and unread, from my mailbox to trash can. I’ll keep muting the TV ads, which have become increasingly desperate for those candidates trailing or in tight races. I’ll keep marveling at how willing candidates of both major parties are to debase themselves in the pursuit of public office and ego-gratification.
I hope I will soon see a decrease in forwarded articles from well-meaning friends written by self-righteous authors who go to extraordinary lengths to tell us how stupid, lame, and corrupt the GOP is. For two more days, I think I can resist responding to them that if the Republicans are that stupid, then how did they manage to control the presidency and both house of Congress for six years, lead us into Wars Without End, bankrupt the economy while fattening the larders of their friends and class allies, shred the Constitution and any semblance of a separation of powers, and leave us with an imperial executive branch that increasingly looks like it belongs in a post-Soviet republic of Central Asia?
For two more days, I think I can resist pointing out that a political system that requires candidates to spend boatloads of money and do all the ass-kissing that raising that kind of money requires is inimical to democracy, dramatically limits who can and cannot run for office, and will ultimately corrupt those office-seekers, even if he is a black American with a political agenda that is admittedly somewhat left of Attila the Hun’s. If I remember correctly, weren’t we all in complete agreement on this before the Obama candidacy?
Against the charge that raising taxes is the worst thing you can say about a candidate other than a willingness to sleep with his or her mother, let me modestly suggest that I don’t mind paying taxes as long as I get something for them, like healthcare and support for the less fortunate, and as long as my tax money is not spent engorging military contractors and destroying poor and innocent women and children who are not a threat to anyone. Can we at least talk about what is done with our taxes in the next two days?
And rather than listening to another free-market fundamentalist decrying any plan to “spread the wealth around,” may I also suggest that that great idea is long overdue and if you, as a candidate, don’t enthusiastically support wealth redistribution in the most unequal economy in the industrialized world, then you should keep your sorry ass and your campaign materials as far as possible from my humble home.
