"American Angst"

"The Long National Nightmare is Over"

So it’s come to this, it's finally over. After 6 billion dollars spent (on this election), 2 million ads run, countless photo ops, blathering on and on by so called experts like Axelrod and Gergen, 10 million comedy jokes, thousands of people able and (more disturbing) willing to spend 10K and up just to eat rubber chicken and get a picture with one of the candidates; and after having to look at Sheldon Addles ton  having to listen to Coulter, Hannity, O’Reilly, Cooper, Blitzer, Donner and Vixen I can’t take anymore. I can’t take anymore!

One editorial(ist) in the NY Times said, “We put too much emphasis on this one election; as if we were selecting the next Messiah”. I tend to agree with that assessment. All this build up, angst, hand-wringing, in-fighting, hair pulling, therapy seeking, relationship breakup causing, anxiety producing, and worry is too damn much. However, it is the sort of protracted melodrama we've come to see too much of in  American  life. Everything is a potential doomsday event, every election is about good vs. evil.

I don’t know if it’s our non-reality based reality shows that have convinced us everything is so important. I mean Snooki’s every move is covered, then analyzed, and speculated about both on TV and in print. Snooki got a haircut today; Snooki met with her agent today, Snooki had a shit fit over the Gorgonzola cheese on her pizza today. In a normal world, Snooki would be a greasy, bloated, obnoxious trophy wife from New Jersey that no one ever heard of. We live in a society that makes Honey Boo Boo the next Siddhartha. Why do I even know the name Honey Boo Boo?  Maybe we just live in a country with so much excess that as a nation (in general) we are bored. Why else would tractor pull events have anyone attending them, why would anyone care which steroid freaked out wrestling star in spandex briefs might win the Final Showdown 10 event?

We find buckets full of melodrama in: day time soaps, nighttime TV, fake reality shows, lottery results, celebrity lives, and even in the economy (we are approaching yet another over the cliff moment aren't we)? Melodrama is in every damn thing we do as people. Ever listen to high school kids? They talk in terms of “all” as in: “I’m all about this or that.” “It’s all fun”, things are “totally”, “way bad” (not just bad), “Oh my god” as if it matters to your God if Billy Buffguy slept with Suzi Creamcheese. Every day is a drama filled day at the high school with sex-ting  social media bullying, and fingers blazing all day long on their cell phones. They may not be learning the significance of the Boston Massacre, Emancipation Proclamation or the Civil Rights Act but they do know that “Chiffon got a dress just like Tiffany and now OMG Tiffany is like totally, totally all pissed off and threatening to go totally Rambo on her”. I used to say to my classes, “You know why there is so much high school drama? It’s because school is boring. If school were exciting (which it could be and should be) you wouldn't have to invent your own excitement.  They laughed but they never said I was wrong.

I don’t know how our country devolved to this anxiety riddled, insomniac inducing soap opera but here we are. Living in a world where the average American cares more about who is going to win “Dancing With the Stars’ or how Chance will survive that back-stabbing Aimee on “Survivor, Oahu” than we do about how the laws were gutted to allow rich fuck’s like Sheldon Addlebrain to try and buy the election, or foreign countries being able to put money into American presidential campaigns. Too many Americans continue to be uninformed, unenthusiastic  and unconcerned with their own lack of civic responsibility to stop the demise of it all. 

Does it really matter that much who sits in the Presidential chair? When Obama won, the Republicans openly stated they would never work with him and their only goal would be to get him out. They held true to their word and with the exception of getting Bin Laden, and barely squeaking through his Obama Care Plan (remember they had to bribe the last voter, the Republican senator from Nebraska, Ben Nelson) to win by one vote, and a couple of deals like a compromise on the college loan repayment percentage not much has really gotten done. If Romney wins do you think the Democrats will welcome him with open arms?? No, they will surely announce that their goal will be to save Obama Care, get Romney out and we’ll have another 4 years of grid lock and partisan fighting.

When the system itself is broken, when the very people the system is supposed to be for could care less; when winning matters more than working together to solve problems then you tell me how much does it matter which frustrated man/woman is sitting in the Oval Office? When melodrama matters more to the average American than the truth, you get a nation of fat assed, glassy-eyed people working on their third quarter pounder, obsessing about what really happened to Michael Jackson on his last day instead of the fact that China is methodically, quietly buying up their country. By the time it’s too late, I wonder if these same average Americans will appreciate the bitter irony of the new owners having installed a teen aged Honey Boo Boo as Commissar of Culture.