Politics, My Lost Love

I used to be really into politics. Really, really into politics. I spent a good portion of every day reading blogs from every side of the political spectrum and got pretty incensed at what I viewed as political offenses. Now, to be frank, I just don’t give a shit anymore. I don’t know when exactly I stopped caring. Sometime around the nomination of Sarah Palin for Vice President, of, like, our entire freaking country. A country about which she knew very little. Now that her family has descended into white trash spectacle, I can’t help but be thankful that the McCain ticket failed. You can say what you want about Joe Biden, but it is hard to imagine him posing for a national magazine in short shorts.

I watched a good chunk of the Republican convention last week and have been tuning in dutifully to the Democrats in North Carolina this week, not because of a resurgent interest in politics, but to watch our country’s further march to late Roman pomp and excess. It was all bread and circuses. Mitt Romney is for America. Marco Rubio is for Marco Rubio. Paul Ryan loves Ayn Rand, but insists that we must protect the weak in our society, begging one to ask if he has read Ayn Rand. Clint Eastwood had a ten minute conversation with a chair. It was crazy.

But the craziest thing about it is how little of the blame for America’s current dismal milieu has, for the Republicans, anything to do with anything systemic in America and is all directly attributable to the nefarious (probably Muslim!) brown-skinned fellow occupying the White House. I get not liking some of Obama’s policies. That is a fair political position to hold. But the problem is that for many conservatives he cannot simply be a genuine and decent man with whom they have policy disagreements, he must be the ANTICHRIST. I don’t get that. He seems like a great man to me—good husband, good father, OK basketball player. But that can’t be the narrative for the extremists; he must be the fount of all evil. And I think that is sad. The Democrats are doing their own part in pushing a similar message this week: if we lose this election, they seem to think, the poor will die in a fog of exhaust from the tailpipe of a rich man’s environmentally unfriendly truck as he chortles and drives off to shoot at some innocent animal. (In the Democrats' America it seems as if all the rich and powerful are Republicans and the weary, huddled masses Democrats, but nothing could be further from the truth, you know, in that annoying real world.) 

No one wants to be told that they are part of the problem and the solution might be to change something. They want to hear that is all the other guy’s fault. It reminds me of what the Apostle Paul wrote to his young protégé, Timothy: “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions” (2 Timothy 4:3). Both parties seem to have done precisely this. It is not you, it is them. You are great, you are what makes America great. You just keep on being you, and we’ll try and fix the mess that those other guys created.

That mutual antagonism and resentment, in a nutshell, is why I no longer care much about politics. And why I'll vote this year, but don't think it really matters much (not only due to the solid redness of my state, but due to the fact that nothing much has really changed these past four years), and will do so while holding my nose plugged.