Reflection On A Toadstool

There is something incredibly stultifying about watching the election returns.  I've done it pretty much since 1956 or so when I watched Eisenhower get his second term or maybe it was 1952.  I don't remember.  It was black and white TV and one of the networks was using computers for the first time to try to forecast election results.

Somehow what was once an exercise of citizenship has over the years degraded into an more empty exercise of popularity and rhetoric.  Television has something to do with it as does the dumbing down of the electorate.  If you compare the way candidates presented themselves in the past to the way they do today you see the emptiness that now pervades the process.  Nothing longer than a 30 second sound bite seems to register.  Some people blame Sesame Street which seems quite a load to heap on Oscar and Big Bird and the rest.  Perhaps as likely is the pervasive short commercial which gets you used to people lying to you about products as if the latest deodorant will solve your social interaction problem.

What I do know is that a man who has one of the worst records in history as president and a record of no real accomplishments, a man whose specialization seems to be looking straight at a camera and lying his head off, has just won reelection over a man with real accomplishments to his name.

I suppose in this imaginary world that television creates, where "reality" is a bunch of people being set vacuous tasks and then being casually discarded by arbitrary power brokers, perhaps it all makes sense.  We just go out into another imaginary world and pull a lever or fill in a form or push images on a touch screen to pick one more power broker.  Little wonder that movies like "The Matrix" characterize the age.

The influence of this election will be felt for a long time.  I don't know if it is the end of the American experiment or not.  It seems likely to be the end of any hope of strict construction of the Constitution as the likelihood is that people of a similar stripe will be appointed to the court as vacancies appear.  The power of the Federal government will continue to expand, already bloated with exaggerated and unconstitutional powers that are being deployed in ways that have damaging effects on our freedoms and our prosperity.  But no one is watching and no-one apparently has the wit to care.

The one thing I remember John Maynard Keynes saying is "In the long run we are all dead."  That's true and I'll stop there.  The toadstool is getting a bit damp from the morning dew and I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.