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The Sad But Undeniable Truth About American Politics.

I’ve almost had it with politics. Americans can no longer tout the Constitution as our white horse. We can no longer blaze the names of our founding fathers as knights of liberty. We have systematically destroyed the very foundation upon which this country rested in its charming innocence, and our once promising nation has been reduced to nothing more than a paranoid thief slipping around corners to dodge justice and laughing in the face of its own people. The saddest part about the entire farce that has come to define American politics is that we have fallen so low from such great heights. If I am a hopeless romantic, let it be. If you want to whisper words of wisdom about the fact that we were destined to implode as a result of our perceived and real power, let it be. I still dream of our white horse as a document worthy of peace and freedom and possessing the ability to carry those causes to fruition, but we have been so distracted by the circus of politics that we’ve lost sight of them.

Finger-Pointing

I say we, because though we can point fingers at politicians and lobbyists all we want, so are “we the people” to blame. We have allowed them, even encouraged them, to make a pageant out of politics. When we say the “Presidential Race,” what we really mean is the “Presidential Runway Show.” They travel from state to state smiling through polished lips, singing lies and pandering to the populace – and the populace greedily eats it up like fried chicken and mashed potatoes. By the end of the day those Presidential candidates’ faces must hurt from all of those forced smiles, and their arms must be sore from waving and picking up little children to pose for photo ops. Not to worry! Of course they have a facialist and masseuse in their entourage, for what bona fide celebrity (I mean politician) doesn’t? They hang out at the same parties as Paris Hilton, so why shouldn’t they have an equally thorough posse, complete with manicurist and someone to retouch their makeup?

The Politician As Celebrity

It is thus that American politics and Hollywood have converged. It is often difficult to distinguish between the two, especially when ol’ Arnie Schwarzenegger is the Governor of California and Jesse Ventura governed Minnesota for four years. When I think of these two second-rate, washed-up celebrities as leaders in my country, I feel as if I have suddenly been transformed into a clown performing brainless stunts for the world to have a good knee-slapping laugh at. What serious voter would really think that The Terminator was going to terminate all of their problems? Furthermore, his attitude towards his position is offensive to me and any other self-respecting voter:

“I wanted to be part of the small percentage of people who were leaders, not the large mass of followers. I think it is because I saw leaders use 100% of their potential—I was always fascinated by people in control of other people.”

I think he is slightly confused about his role as governor, and the role of political figures in general. He has a duty, not to control a group of “followers” (presumably he is referring to his voters and the people of California as his followers), but to create and maintain a harmonious collection of laws, actions and civil pursuits that preserve a peaceful state. Furthermore – Arnie, how dare you imply that leaders are the only people who use 100% of their potential? You are insulting some of the greatest thinkers, writers and artists of history and belittling some of the greatest (in my opinion) accomplishments of humanity. Think of Michaelangelo, Beethoven, Shakespeare. Even if you used 100% of your potential, you couldn’t even come close to touching their brilliance. If I so choose, I could use 100% of my potential to dash your reputation on jagged rocks with words and use the power of my voice 100% to slander your sorry ass back to Austria. However, you are just not important enough to me to do anything more than use you as an example of the pitiful state of my country’s politics.

Tele-Pollution

We have allowed our precious televisions to pollute our minds and rot our virtue. Flipping through the channels, one goes from American Idol, to Iraqi civilians being held at gunpoint, to George Bush’s State of the Union, to Family Guy. How can we possibly take Georgie seriously when he’s next to Family Guy and American Idol (the other inherent question is how can we take Georgie seriously at all, EVER, wherever he may be?)? Our minds are numbed by all the pretty pictures floating by, so that when we finally come to Georgie’s personal report about what a terrible job he’s doing, we just flip right past because we can’t be expected to miss this episode of American Idol. As for Iraq and death and violence and reality, we are suspended so far beyond empathy and humanity in TV Land that we simply change the channel to something less depressing, like “America’s Next Top Model.” And then our sympathy flows like water, for it is much easier to feel sorry for the poor skinny girls on television who are struggling to be pretty and win million-dollar modeling contracts than it is to feel the pain of a woman in a black cloak with dark skin, dirty face streamed with tears of anguish, speaking a foreign tongue and having nothing whatsoever to do with anything Hollywood, except that she has a really good spot next to Georgie and American Idol on the telly. It is easier for Georgie to feed us his lies when we are more than willing to ignore their gravity by pressing a button. Georgie loves the telly.

Pick Up the Trash

Television isn’t the only venue in which we seek ignorance (for don’t they say that ignorance is bliss?). Americans practically devour In Touch, Us Weekly and Entertainment magazines. We know everything about the lives of Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie and Cameron Diaz. We hate and admire and covet them like catty high school girls. We want to be like them, we dress like them, we dye our hair just like theirs – and then we turn around and talk smack on them with the hairdresser just as the last breath of “Can you cut my hair just like…?” leaves our lips. We have allowed this same shallow dance of popularity to penetrate and make a mockery of the governing institutions of our country. That’s downright frightening, and to make matters worse, while In Touch and Us Weekly experience mammoth growth in sales, newspaper sales have been on the downfall for years. This means that people have dropped the New York Times in lieu of the easier-to-swallow celebrity trash-talkers. America, we have become the catty teenage girl that swallows.

Swallowing Nothing But Sweet Lies

So here we have our politicians studying popular opinion to see what their own opinions should look like, so that they are not left behind in the Runway Show. One minute they’re Pro-Choice, and the next they’re Pro-Life, according to the fluctuations in the stats on abortion. I suppose they take us for idiots. After all, we haven’t done much to prove them wrong, after having re-elected one of the most hideous blemishes in the history of the United States Presidency. They can pretty much tell America anything, and we’ll swallow it. We love to swallow. What’s worse is that most of the lies we swallow aren’t even good ones – they’re so transparent that it’s embarrassing to hear them told. However, we are expected to believe them because we’ve shown these people in the past that we will swallow just about anything – as I may have mentioned, we really like to swallow.

1, 2, 3 Swallow Real Big for the Cameras!

When Bush said we’re going to Iraq because of terrorists and WMDs, there was some opposition, especially from the left, but ultimately, we swallowed it. And then on the other hand we gulped down the big one when Bush shook the hand of General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and continues to fill his pockets with our tax dollars, even as Pakistan churns out nuclear weapons and Osama Bin Ladens like the terror factory that it is. Or take Reverend Pat Roberson’s recent endorsement of Rudy Guiliani (see New York Times article, “Hey, Canidate, I’m All Yours, Your Very Own Pied Piper.”) This Reverend is the same man who once said that “the terror attacks of Sept. 11 proved that God was lifting his protection from an abortion-giving, gay-loving nation.” (quoted from the Times article, not Reverend Pat Robertson). One minute he’s damning New Yorkers to Hell and the next he’s supporting a man who is symbolic of New York City, at least in the theater of National Politics. We’re spinning around in circles here – I feel dizzy, how about you?

The Money Shot

So now that we’ve smeared our national face with all of the lies that we’ve been swallowing for so long, is it time, as yet another election approaches, to pay attention to history? Can we please make sure that we don’t invite another Georgie into office to piss all over American politics (not that it hasn’t already become a urinal for vile morons, but he really sealed the deal), not to mention butcher the English language (an especially sordid offense, in my opinion, for I love my language and despise those who misuse it)? I myself have never been much of a swallower – it makes me gag. Instead of watching television, I read Jon Stewart’s “America.” Instead of reading Us Weekly, I read the newspaper. Don’t you want to stop murdering brain cells with apathy? It’s about time we stopped swallowing America.