November 3, 2008: The Best Laid Plans…
Monday, November 3rd, 2008Well, the eve of the election is nearly upon us.
Which means that glances are being exchanged and messages quietly sent. Chads are preparing to hang in Florida. Graphic artists at all the news outlets — and Fox — are putting the final touches on ‘Obama/McCain Wins!’ broadcast bumpers, getting ready either way.
And the cynic in me gets the impression this entire flurry of activity is very much akin to the frantic efforts put on by a stage crew before the curtains go up on a play. Because they want it too look good, even though the whole thing is scripted, predictable, orchestrated right down to the last word and the last bow.
Please tell me I’m wrong. I hope I am.
Yeah, I’d like to see Obama win. And more than that, I’d like to see him shift the country out of this quaqmire and onto something resembling an intelligent path. Will that happen?
No idea. I do feel that a McCain White House will resemble a Bush White House in everything important. Pre-emptive wars, continued carte blanc to the oil industry, the clear-cutting of Alaska just for the heck of it. Sure, McCain and usually get from one end to the other of a simple English sentence without making a complete idiot of himself, but he’s just Bush 2.0, and that’s just not what we need. Ever. Again.
America will lurch, shamble, weave, and stomp to the polls tomorrow. Frankly, I don’t have much faith in their decision-making abilities; these are the same people I see in Wal-Mart day after day getting confused and irate over 20 items or less lanes and the basic tenants of simple hygiene. I estimate that a good portion of the voters will be voting not for anyone but against the black man, some others will be voting for Sarah Palin because she likes to hunt, and a good portion of the remaining voters will be voting under the sadly mistaken idea that the voting machine is a Video Blackjack device.
I did say I was a cynic.
But we’ll see. Obama is up in the polls, right now, but that’s hardly even relevant, since the actual deciding is done by the Electoral College, using a complicated system of dice rolls, divination of goat entrails, necromancy, thaumaturgy, random number generation, pitch piping, cockroach racing, and, finally, coin-flipping done in the dark by a pair of shadowy Illuminati figures who enter and leave unseen save for a brief note bearing the name of the winner and a bill for 111 billion dollars. But they do supply their own coin.
If you’re an American, go vote, on the off chance that something goes wrong in that deep basement at Diebold and your vote actually counts.
If you’re not American, well, at least you get to watch from a safe distance.
Not that any distance is really safe anymore.
Ain’t I a ray of sunshine?