I've found myself approaching a saturation point as far as the presidential election this year is concerned, but it hasn't been a process that has left me bored or cold with the whole thing, but rather it has pushed me against a psychological wall. The stakes, for me, seem very high to begin with, obviously. I view the potential of a McCain/Palin administration as about the least attractive thing since, well, the Bush/Cheney administration, except it'll be a new dynamic of awful so I won't be able to deflect the indignity of it all as easily.
My big concern though, and admittedly selfish one, is that if the GOP's gamble pays off and somehow voters are so charmed by Sarah Palin that they swoop into office, I'm not sure what will happen to my brain. I think I might suffer a legitimately damaging psychological or emotional trauma from such a happening. It speaks to a general distrust I have of the values and voting records of a portion (I guess a large enough portion to deliver two heavily contested elections) or the country in which I live. It's an isolating feeling; I've grown up in the Bay Area my entire life, which is irrefutably one of the biggest liberal communities in the United States, and while I tend to think of my own political views as being developed and not inherited, it does create a jarring sort of dual experience.
I have never, over the course of my life, been in a large room of people who I knew were political conservatives. I've probably never been in a room where there was a half and half balance in a large group. So I've grown and thrived in an environment that, if sometimes more in intention than in function, reflects many of my views and desires in the political realm. This creates a brutal contrast, though, when a man like George W. Bush is elected. I was just fourteen his first year. I had, even at that point, identified him as a cancerous politician. The idea of voting for a man because he seems like your buddy that you'd invite over to a barbecue struck me as stupid at age fourteen, but apparently carried enough weight to land Bush in the white house. Granted he dealt with some last minute tumult in Florida (you can likely deduce my stance on that situation), but he was in, and now I had to live with him.
I started out hoping the best that I felt I reasonably could hope; that Bush would be a terrible president (which was a certainty), but that he would be most impactfully terrible on people other than me. There ought to be a limited number of ways a jackoff president can screw you when you're a white fourteen year old with a passable amount of money in your wallet, I reasoned. And for a while there, it seemed like I was correct.
One morning I didn't get out of bed was September 11th of 2001. I was, gosh, a sophomore in high school then, so I guess I had Social Issues first period. My then girlfriend was in that class, and I was starting to smell blood in the water that she might dump me. I was exhausted on top of it, and didn't want to face the school day, so I lamely suggested to my mother, who had knocked on my door to wake me like every morning, that I was tired and didn't feel like going to school. Oddly, she and my dad offered no protest. I would learn after another three hours of slumber about the World Trade Center going down.
After the attacks everything about the Bush administration took on a familiar, sinister edge. It was the edge of a type of power that I could find no philosophical agreement or comfort with. This feeling towards the president, and indeed a feeling which perverted what I considered the office of the president to ideally embody, has stuck with me from then till now. From when I was a fourteen year old starting out in high school to now, I have lived under the Bush administration, and I've hated it. I've hated what it's done to our country, what we've done to other countries, and what it's done to my optimism. There's been such a constant downpour of offensive stink off of everything I've watched this government do over the past eight years that I find myself incapable of relating as the next election looms near.
I realized it was becoming a problem during the Republican convention. As I was driving home, I listened to Rudy Giuliani on the radio, enticing the St. Paul crowd into the chant of "drill, baby, drill!" I punched the radio off in disgust. Minutes later I strolled into my living room to find a woman from Alaska, among others things, thrash community organizers, cause I guess trying to do good work in your community is, uhm, stupid? And then I listened to a slate of pundits talk about how energizing and transformative her speech was.
All I can say is... really? This again? All of these folks are going to vote, again, for somebody who boasts little to no stated policy positions, but seems like a good ol' boy from the neighborhood? To be fair, Sarah Palin specifically called out the "good ol' boy" establishment, but that ignores the fact that she embodies many if not all of the values of that group; she's a conservative, pro-life (even if your dad rapes you), NRA sponsored hunter who thinks that global warming in a myth. She's basically a... good ol' gal, I guess? Also, she has too many kids. Overpopulation, man. I bet Sarah Palin was the kind of person who would play Oregon Trail on the Mac Classic and shoot waaaaaay too many buffalo. "You shot 1565 pounds of buffalo... but you could only carry 225 pounds of it back to your wagon!"
In any case, as the election gets closer, I've begun to see a worsening in my nerves. I recently picked up a copy of Obama's book The Audacity of Hope, cause I was at an airport and needed something to read. I was struck rather quickly by what a great writer he is, and in a distinctly different and more thoughtful way than he even appears in interviews and such. I got about a hundred pages into it, and then something happened. I couldn't read any more. I was enjoying the book so much that somehow it didn't feel safe to keep reading. Until I actually know for a fact that that's the man who's going to be taking over, I feel like reading his work is opening me up to sustain an additional wound. If America won't elect an Obama now, after eight years of what's almost universally seen as a train wreck presidency, I can't envision a scenario in which we ever will. And the idea that Sarah Palin could ultimately be what stands in the way, well, that'd be enough to send me to the mental hospital.
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