Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Conventional Conventions

The Democratic Party nominated Barack Obama. Yawn. The Republican Party will nominate John McCain next. Longer Yawn. Wake me up when the Orwellian splurge is over.

In a world in which 17 people will die of hunger within the next minute, what justifies the $4 billion political orgy we call a presidential election?

If the political discourse had some depth, if the pseudoevents had some real mystery to them, if the electorate took the time to learn what's involved in being a citizen of a self-governing nation, then perhaps, some expenditure to work out the world's longest-running political experiment might be worthwhile.

As it is, we're stuck with a barrage of non-issue advertising. Every moment is a scripted appeal to emotion. One candidate claims to care for the country merely because he failed at war and was taken prisoner, all the while hiding that he really stands for the privilege of the few. The other wants to offer change yet cannot risk exposing the details to his adversary's demagoguery.

In the end we have a very expensive political circus put on by the plutocracy, in the name of an alleged democracy, all aimed at the deluded, defrauded, abused majority of the electorate.

This is true in all the Western democracies, not just the United States. Yet few countries spend waste as much time and money on the project with, to judge by the last two elections alone, as paltry a result to show for it.