It’s starting. God help us. On Fox News just now I heard Senator Evan Bayh handicapping his own chances for the presidential nomination and talking about running against Hillary. It reminds me of pro wrestling, this stuff. They get us geared up an eon in advance for a fake fight, the battle of the century, and the ticket-buying mania begins. The rivals plot and posture, working us up even further for a match whose outcome, we’re led to think, will have titanic consequences for everyone, and yet when it finally comes, not much changes except that the political establishment has a lot more money in its pockets. The issues are mostly symbolic. As I sit here on my Montana farm, I could care less about the Ten Commandments, the past behavior of Supreme Court nominees, whether Karl Rove outed a non-spy spy, and if John Bolton likes to yell at people.
Other than Jen-and-Brad celebrity gossip and the serial popular novels posing as crime stories such as this Aruba thing, this hyped-up so-called politics is all people have to talk about now, it seems. I remember when people talked about themselves. At thee dinner table and in the diner you heard about that sports car-from-a-kit your neighbor was building, about some lady’s kidney tumor, about who was wooing another man’s wife, and about the bear that was eating from someone’s apple tree. These little stories added up to life. You got a sense of how people were actually managing. Now you hear what they’re thinking. What a bore. Most of them can’t think, and have never tried, and are just repeating what others think and adding their own misinterpretations and biases. I could care less, frankly. I’d rather hear about what somebody’s doing to get rid of the bat infestation in their attic. But no, it’s Washington, Washington, Washington, which is thousand of miles away from western Montana but has somehow convinced us it’s right next door. Well, it’s not. The neighbors are next door. But because they talk only about politics, I have no idea what their lives are like and they don’t either for the most part, they don’t either. They’re trying to join the “national conversation” and meanwhile the bears are eating their apples.
Me, I don’t even have a politics — not in any coherent left-right sense — and I wonder sometimes where other people get theirs. No one’s born a Republican or a Democrat or even and Independent, for Pete’s Sake, but in time we all become one or the other. Bowing to expectations, it seems to me, trying to seem grown-up and serious and entitled to join in a “debate” that’s about as substantial sometimes as Friday night stadium cage-match. The older I get, the less I’m bothered by low voter turn-out. It’s a rational response to an irrational spectacle that mostly just profits its promoters.
The Dish 