I would love to be a more involved voter. I live in one of the biggest cities in the world, in one of the richest, most populous, and educated regions on earth – one of the most influential has ever existed on earth in the history of homo sapiens sapiens.
And it will all be over by the time anything I can do will influence it. I’m not a billionaire, so I can’t influence it by donating money. I don’t live in Iowa or New Hampshire, so the primaries which select the candidates, will have been decided by the time I get to vote in the primaries.
Same for the actual election between the candidates that we didn’t get to choose. Other than the fig leaf of not calling the election til the polls on the Left Coast close, it will already have been decided by the time the polls close on the Left Coast.
It’s somehow far more important that a bunch of superstitious hog farmers and racist hicks from the flyover states decide the candidates and the election than it is that the population of 80% of the country do. The candidates can deride New York morals and Silicon Valley ethos and Hollywood ethics, but this is where the country lives. New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Everyone who comes to the Rose Bowl on New Years Day ends up wanting to live in Pasadena. No one lives on farms anymore, and no one in their right minds wants to.
When I meet someone who tells me they dream of moving to a small town and live on a farm, I back away slowly, same as I do the fellow telling me about Tower 7. And he’s far more likely to be right than the god-botherers from Iowa, or the honest-labor-back-to-the-earth idiots who imagine that getting horseshit kicked into your mouth at branding time somehow imparts wisdom.
And I meet those kind of people all the time. They are quite literally divorced from reality. Their grandparents sweated blood to get away from the smalltown gossips in Bumfuck OH and slopping pigs, and their idiot grandchildren want to get back to it? Except not really – they’re never going to do it. They’re never going to be that far from a Whole Foods. They just romanticize it and allow the idiots in Iowa to select the people who are going to run the country. Not with good results.
Those are the kind of people determining the candidates, and that’s why a short-fingered vulgarian and a serial dissembler who was stupid enough to use a personal email server are the main candidates for Leader of the Free World.
You can talk about how to increase voter turnout. Impose fines for not voting, as Australia. Make Election Day a holiday, as the rest of the world. But as long as the candidates are selected by two of the smallest non-representative hick states, and the elections are determined before the polls in the richest and most educated region in the world close, it’s all bullshit.
I drove an hour this morning listening to election coverage from public radio. And not a word was said about the candidates differing stances. It was all just horserace this-candidate-ahead-five-in-this-bullshit-poll, and the-other-ahead-three-in-the-other-bullshit-poll. Fuck you Don Ganje and Mara Liasson NPR. Another reason why you’ll never get a dime from me. I hope the Republicans, when they control both the House and Senate, cut your funding to zero. Although I don’t know why they would, given the sloppy blowjobs you give them every time they’re on your station.