Email
Print
The end of the world... NOT!
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: November 5, 2008
By the time you read this we will have learned who won the quadrennial apocalypse. Per the warnings of the last several months in opposing multi-million dollar media blitzes, our fate over the next four years now rests in the hands of one or another of the two most dangerous denizens on the planet with half of us facing utter ruin and the other half basking in the golden dawn of a new age.
Both melodramatic scenarios are camp stage sets, the obverse and reverse of a single old mundane reality. At most, business as usual is sweetened briefly with the new flavor of the day or insidiously poisoned, depending on whether your scarf or necktie is blue or red.
Get over it.
Obama and McCain and Bob Barr certainly will. This morning -- the "Ash Wednesday" of politics -- saw the vanquished pledging patriotic allegiance to the victor through pearly politician teeth, urging us all to turn on a dime and do the same. And we should.
But all this instant reconciliation has a certain surreal aspect to it. It's as if Richard the Lion Hearted and Saladin the Saracen have suddenly flipped a coin for control of Jerusalem and parted friends for the greater good of monotheism. It's rather like the Angel Gabriel and Lucifer making nice after Armageddon.
In the wee hours of this morning TV pundits once again had us wrenching our arms out of their sockets to pat ourselves on the back for yet another of the peaceful transfers of power that set us apart from Rwanda, Afghanistan or European Georgia. But the transfer was less peaceful than we tell ourselves.
Over the past year, a few hundred million dollars were spent by this morning's newly reconciled colleagues in demonizing and undercutting each other. It's instructive to reflect on the relative value to society of money spent on brickbats versus bricks-and-mortar.
If the economy is in as bad a shape as pundits would have us believe, what a shocking waste of treasure this election has been. The TV budget alone would have kept every employee who's been laid-off in the present down-turn in medical insurance for a few weeks or months. It would have hired a formidable army of teachers (or appreciably raised the standard of living for the ones we have now) for quite a while.
All that treasure spent and sent out over the airwaves is gone, gone with the wind. Most of the issues it painted as desperate faded away in the wee hours this morning with an oh-so-civil telephone call and, in due course, a follow-up handshake.
Try to imagine how many times over you would have to multiply the enormous presidential campaign funding outlay in order to measure out the much larger combined cost of all the senatorial, congressional, gubernatorial, county and judgeship races that also just ended. Somewhere there's probably a bean counter who could convert it to a real number of teachers and street cops and ER nurses. We'll never know.
Americans are all about winning -- sometimes too much so. Mark Twain wrote about a frog jumping contest where one contestant fed his opponent's frog lead buckshot; and even as American an icon as the Soap Box Derby was fudged one year, using an electromagnet concealed by a kid in his racer with his mentoring dad's help.
Spending hundreds of millions on political advertising is like equipping a Soap Box Derby racer with Stinger missiles. All sense of balance and merit and value is buried under mountains of spin and spots.
In good times and bad, the United States has been valued abroad for the liberty we insist on for ourselves and have often sacrificed to preserve for others. The circus of the last year is not similarly valued. And we don't value the circus ourselves; we're ashamed of it. Our elections have become the super-squandering of a super-power's diminishing resources.
In London last January, a speaker on alternative railway fuels pointed out that world opinion was turning sharply away from vehicle biofuels because they divert land and resources from food production. One UN report, quoted there, characterized ethanol production for transportation as a "crime against humanity."
If our hypothetical bean counter could run up a spreadsheet to convert this election year's campaign expenditures to metric tons of rice or wheat, how many African or Asian countries would it feed?
It's morning in America -- though maybe not a Ronald Reagan sort of morning. Yard signs have begun to disappear. Like Cinderella's carriage horses reverting to mice, Obama and McCain are reverting to genteel senators for a couple of months.
The world, whatever you heard last week, is not about to collapse in an avalanche of senility or inexperience -- though it may have altered course to port a few points just before the sun came up.
Still, all will be well.
But a lot of national resources have gone up in smoke and mirrors.
(Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com)
Email
Print
