America “Decides”
It’s Election Day, America’s quadrennial exercise is kabuki theater and cargo cult. Today, millions of Americans will go to the polls, exercising their faith in two of the most core tenets of our national religious faith: Every vote counts and this decision matters.
Election seasons are like panic attacks. There’s all kinds of fluster and excitement until a climax is reached. Afterwards, one feels a little silly wondering what all the fuss was about. So America will fidget and fluster until about 10 o’clock EST, when it becomes completely apparent that the former governor of Kolob never had a prayer anyway. A Mitt Romney victory would be possible only under circumstances of gross voter fraud that would make Barack Obama’s Chicago patrons blush.
Third-party voters should take small comfort in that last fact: Liberals will still blame you.
The lady or the tiger? Smug liberal triumphalism or smug conservative triumphalism? I’m 32 years old and I’m not sure which repulses me more.
It’s a moot point. The next 48 hours will be a torrent of liberal triumphalism, highlighting the alleged “successes” of the administration (for example, the destruction of wages in the auto industry, publicly taking the same position on marriage equality as Dick Cheney, or the coolest illegal war ever!) while conspicuously downplaying or ignoring the war crimes, the police states, the attacks on wages and benefits and the impending austerity and expanded wars.
Today used to excite me. When I was a kid, this was like Christmas and the World Series combined. It was everything that I’d spent the last 11 months (I’m so old that election campaigns actually began in the year the election was held) tracking and closely following. In 2012, Election Day depresses me. It’s never been clearer to me that American politics is little more than a cross between a declaration of cultural fealty and voodoo. It’s not exactly unexpected or terribly disillusioning. It is, however, incredibly depressing.