Monday, September 8, 2008
You like your politics like you like your sex — brief, apathetic and impersonal. However, just like that pretty-little-bad-decision who sits next to you in English comp, the presidential campaigns will soon be leaving you emotionally overwrought messages and demanding commitment.
But, unlike that smokin’-hot-unwanted-pregnancy you met in the stacks, you can’t just keep taking circuitous routes around campus to avoid them. They’re everywhere.
“Look at me, I’m a registered Democrat!”
“No, over here, registered Republican!”
No one cares — I’m a registered sex offender, but you don’t see me bragging about it, putting up signs, or going door to door in the neighborhood because the state requires me to.
Nevertheless, this is America: You have a civic duty to cast a futile and uninformed vote for either the candidate who will continue moving the country down its same doomed path or the candidate who will have the audacity of hope necessary to take our country into new and exciting areas of doom.
First, there’s Democratic nominee Barack Obama. His campaign symbol is a giant “O” cresting the flag, like the ever-open eye of some pagan god peering over the horizon and into your soul.
The thing is absolutely terrifying. I don’t know whether to vote for him or offer him my first-born.
Obama’s wife has even declared that Obama “will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual — uninvolved, uninformed.” The hell he won’t. I barely let real God tell me what to do in my day-to-day life, and Obama’s offering me free healthcare for eternity. Obama doesn’t stand a chance.
Still, Obama could make history. If elected, that would not only make him the first black man to be president, it would also make him the first Hawaiian to be anything.
But Republican nominee John McCain could also make history, becoming the first 44th white male president. Also, with vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, they could break another barrier. Females have always been able to secretly titter about the attractiveness of the male candidates.
Not anymore. I have a dream that one day men will be able to proudly proclaim: “Oh yeah, I’d gerrymander her districts any day. Filibuster her senate floor for 24 hours straight.”
However, McCain is old: older than sin, or at least those sins that involve moving pictures or the ingestion of scientifically engineered chemicals.
He’s been a Republican so long his brain is like a time-capsule for bad ideas. The only upside is that it’s not conceptually possible for him to become any older.
Like the Y2K bug, he’s bound to roll around to the aught-aughts sometime soon.
If you’ve found this discharge of your political duties painful — not to mention abnormally thick — don’t blame me. Perky-young-venereal-roulette just left you a rather somber voicemail.
Reichert is an Oberlin graduate student in law.
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