’twas the night before voting
A seldom reported consequence of this week’s election will be an inevitable spike in unemployment figures, as thousands of tv commentators, campaign strategtists, and bloggers become suddenly irrelevant. There’s a whole new economic class of people whose job description consists of talking about things that happened, but who make nothing happen themselves. This year, and certainly for the last month, it’s been as if the election consisted entirely of commentary about commentary, while discerning voters (all eighteen of us) have had to strip off layer upon layer of analysis to get to the actual candidates. It’s what I imagine it must have been like to finally be alone with a woman in the Victorian era–by the time you’ve stripped off the dress, the petticoats, the girdle and the bloomers, the passion’s gone and you’re just wondering what you were after in the first place.
“Meet The Press” is a great example of this tail-chasing dog. This venerable show elegant in it’s simplicity–someone in the press talking to someone in the news. Now we get to watch some regional campaign strategist from one side arguing with someone else’s deputy campaign chairman about a video clip of a senior campaign advisor reacting to…something–by that point I’ve forgotten who I’m voting for.
Other victims of this imminent politico-depression will be the companies that make the high-tech polling/tracking gadgets. Now I think red state-blue state maps of the United States are as cool as the next guy, but how will we retool them to be useful until the next election. Maybe, since Americans are dunderheads about geography, the nightly news can have a segment where the anchor simply points at a state with his telestrator and asks viewers if they can call in to identify it (”43 percent of you correctly guessed North Dakota”).
The whole ‘red state’/'blue state’ paradigm has started to sound a little too Dr. Seuss for my tastes. Red State, Blue State, Old State, New State. It reminds me too much of USA Today, with it’s colors, and pie charts, and simple upbeat headlines. If a nuclear bomb killed millions of people in this country, I imagine their headline would be “Lots of Us Still Left–And We’re Shopping More!” Their masthead should say “Not Too Much News At One Time.”
The ripple effect of the upcoming post-election economy will be tragic. Late night monologues gutted…MSNBC going off the air entirely, with Keith Olbermann calling ESPN to get his SportsCenter job back and Chris Matthews left to just yell at random people on the street…C-SPAN running eight-hour marathons of ‘Booknotes’…We can’t let this happen, people, so l suggest we make this election best three out of five, and on November 5th, start ‘Campaign ‘09–The Rematch.’ Do it all over again. Have another round of primaries, and this time let Ralph Nader and Ron Paul start with three or four hundred delegates. And more debates–one every couple days.
