not of this world

all those years i spent working for impossible, failed elections is finally paying off.
now the fact that Nancy Pelosi is going to be the ominipresent speaker of the house (and all of the other shudder inducing silliness which awaits us courtesy of a schitzophrenic consumer electorate) just rolls right off. no political happenings will ever be as disappointing as my first election when i was actually naive and idealistic enough to think that AK was really going to be our philospher-king president (by IL i had grown a decidedly thicker skin, but still had those moments where i slipped back in to mad, delerious denial). at least, in my opinion, many of the gop candidates deserved to go down. and if the clowns taking their place don’t do anything too dangerous foreign policy-wise in the next two years (but obnoxious enough to wake up some of the more intelligent citizens), perhaps this is just the icky necessary stage out of which greater good will emerge. and at least the establishment country club republicans that i’m usually losing to are the ones this really burns.

with every campaign cycle i find myself growing more and more detached. i still maintain some hope and try to do my part, but find that expecting the worst is psychologically the best route to go. who knows, maybe someday an election will actually surprise me and be about the most worthy instead of the most crafty and well consulted/funded. until then i’m trying to go the padre pio route in general: pray, hope and don’t worry. (and i vote, just for the h of it, though still being registered in CA it feels especially like an exercise in absolute futility.)

if the election results were really just a referendum on the war, or any real corporate philosophic recalibration carefully deliberated by the American people, pro-war lieberman wouldn’t have won in liberal new england, establishment gop seat warmers wouldn’t have won with majorities, and the couple formidable statesman who actually were on the ballots in a few lucky states wouldn’t have suffered such blowing defeats. voters for the most part just don’t know anything about their candidates or ballot initiatives or what is really as stake in each contest save for the crafty advertisements they see on t.v. they spend more time researching what kind of ring tone to put on their cell than who they are going to send to the capitol to make law which will effect them in virtually every aspect of their life. they’re feelings driven, impulse voters and that is not a strategy that results in wise outcomes.

the bill in Missouri whose ads claimed would save lives by what is portrayed as the inevitable promise of embryonic stem cells (and purporting to prohibit human cloning in the process) actually enshrines in the state’s constitution unrevokable protections for somatic cell nuclear transfer (cloning), although for now the cloned human embryos will be immediately disengaged, stopped from doing what it is they would naturally do otherwise, or in a word, killed. so the bill actually enacts unreversable protections so that a human embryo can be artificially created to be killed, human life harvesting, pay offs to desperate women for their eggs, etc. but who really has time to read the bills that they’re voting on these days, i mean really. the ad shows little children asking for help to overcome their diseases; Michael J. Fox, who in full disclosure admitted he never read the bill prior to endorsing it, made such a heartbreaking commercial highlighting his tragic battle, what more does a voter really need to know before participating in the process by which such important matters will be decided? elections should be about ideas, deliberations should be based in the substance or lack thereof of those ideas. but the last thing voters are being encouraged to do these days is actually be informed. i think one of the best things we could do for the republic is make television advertising for campaigns illegal and substitute substanitive debates, with viewing mandatory for all voters. i know, i might as well be saying that the best thing for the republic is for there to be elected a philosopher king.