Mr Fish, Truthdig
There it sits on the calendar, Election Day, like a megaton turd of brain-draining Kryptonite, its intellectually deleterious effects emanating out from the Tuesday after the first Monday of November like moron radiation from a black hole of empty pomp and circumscription so devoid of meaning that not even irony can escape it.
“Drill everywhere. There is no such thing as global warming,” says candidate Rick Santorum to the sort of unbridled applause that one might otherwise expect in the face of reason. And look, there’s Michele Bachmann commenting on gay marriage by saying, “They can get married. They can marry a man if they’re a woman. Or they can marry a woman if they’re a man.” Remarkably, she is not hit in the head with a shoe. Herman Cain is there too, squaring his jaw and explaining what it means to be a man. “The more toppings a man has on his pizza, I believe the more manly he is. A manly man don’t want it piled high with vegetables! He would call that a sissy pizza,” he says. His approval rating soars.
Mitt Romney, speaking from beneath a hairdo assembled at the Fortress of Sophistry by GM robots: “Don’t try to stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.” Newt Gingrich, speaking ominously while the Winning Our Future super PAC flicks the light switch on and off and makes lightening and thunder sounds with its mouth: “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”
Is there no more convincing proof that there is nothing like a presidential campaign to demonstrate just how profoundly detached we are as a nation from recognizing why ours is a functioning democracy in reputation alone?
Read this very clever assessment of American electioneering in full swing at Truthdig …