This is also not a political post …

I had no plans to follow up that other post, but – dear lord, it’s only the middle of September and I’m already about to go mad. By the beginning of November these endless, mindless commercials will have me gibbering and strait-jacketed.

New Linda McMahon commercial (radio, and thus unavoidable, God help me): “Linda’s tax cuts only affect the middle class – her own taxes would not change at all.”

So what is Linda supposed to be – upper class?

In a pig’s eye. She’s rich. There is no class there.

Also, when the presidential candidates suspended their campaigns out of deference to the remembrance of September 11, McMahon, if anything, stepped up her efforts. I don’t recall hearing or seeing an ad from her opponent, but she demonstrated a marked lack of respect for the day by bulling right on with her endless spew of wasted money. I wrote to her website asking why; somehow I’m not surprised I didn’t get an answer. At least they’re not spamming my email address.

Is it election day yet?

 

This is not a political post

It really isn’t about politics. It’s more about the basic quality of life in an election cycle, and about common sense and WTFery and things like that.

Ever since the last election cycle, the two dirtiest words in my household have been “Linda McMahon”. That name is enough to make my ordinarily very mild mother’s eyes blaze. It’s not because McMahon’s a Republican – no one in my family has ever been very political, and my one venture into giving a damn did not end well on a personal level; that period was the death knell for any optimism and eagerness that was left alive in me. I don’t care anymore. We don’t care what McMahon’s politics are; I couldn’t even tell you what her campaign promises are (we mute every commercial possible, and when it’s not possible tune them out). At this point she could be running a save-the-puppies campaign and I wouldn’t vote for her if you paid me.

Here’s the thing: she’s rich as Croesus. Now, I admit it: that’s automatically a black mark against a person in my book, to remain a negative unless mitigating factors can be presented. (I admit it freely – it’s my one prejudice.) Mitigating factors can include: a hell of a lot of hard work to earn the money. An attitude showing a marked lack of rubbing anyone’s face in it. A dedication to using said money to help others.

McMahon’s commercials usually aim at factor #1: Linda worked so very hard to get where she is! Okay. And in what field did she work?

Professional wrestling.

Words cannot express the horror with which that fills me.

But – thank God – she is no longer wrestling (as far as I know), and supposedly this sordid past brought jobs to the state back in the day, so, fine. I can get over it – even the little snippet an opponent once brought out of her on all fours and barking like a dog in the ring.

What negates any positive factors that do or could ever exist for this woman is her financial aggressiveness toward getting the job of senator for this state. In the last campaign, she bragged that she was willing to spend $50 million of her own money on the election. I believe the final number was bigger than that. That right there? Goes against possible mitigating factor #2: it is rubbing her money in the face of everyone with less, and basically admitting to making a damned good attempt at buying a senate seat.

What did she get for her money?

She didn’t get the job.

Instead, what she bought was the undying loathing of every member of my family (and not a few others I’ve spoken to). Why? Because she’s bloody everywhere. Every television and radio commercial break – since APRIL – has included a McMahon commercial. Her (already unpleasant) voice has become more and more (and MORE) irritating as time has passed. She has been advertised in more different commercials than Coca Cola – more even than Viagra and its counterparts. That’s probably the biggest part of what all that money bought her, for the last election; I don’t think she’s bragged about what she’s shelling out for this one.

Some of the rest went to making hers a multi-media campaign of aggravation. I am a registered independent (because I find both parties equally repugnant and equally nothing I want to be associated with). My mother is a registered Democrat. So I would absolutely love an explanation as to why we have received not only mailings but telephone calls – plural – from the McMahon campaign.

Fifty million dollars … she’s spent more than twice that by now, is my guess. A hundred mill would buy a lot of textbooks for struggling school systems, or – oh, I don’t know, food for people who don’t have any. (See #3, above.) For it to be pissed away on such garbage as this (probably fruitless, or so I pray) campaign makes me literally physically ill.

Maybe the media consultants and those who produce the commercials have been counted into those 600 jobs she keeps boasting about.

Speaking of prompting – what’s prompted me to dash off this post is yet another irritation of those radio ads I can’t avoid: she is constantly berating those “career politicians” who haven’t miraculously fixed the world yet. And every single time I wonder: why is it so awful to be a “career politician” but not what she has become – a career politician-wannabe?

———————————————————————–

What I said over two years ago still stands, too…

 

Everyone Is Entitled to My Opinion – David Brinkley

This was a quickie fill-in book which I’ve had on my shelf for a while; it finally made its way to the top. When I originally picked it up wherever I picked it up, I thought it would be a brief memoir of some sort – but what it actually is is a collection of a number of the one-to-two-minute closing commentaries from This Week With David Brinkley from 1981 – 1996. Something a little lighter, so that viewers did not come away from the show too down-hearted after all of the talk of recession and murder and drugs.

And some of these are very light-hearted – like the story of the boy (in New Haven, CT – I don’t think I remember that) who ran away, and took up residence at the bottom of his apartment building’s elevator shaft. He leeched power for a small TV and, I believe, a hot plate, and was only discovered because building residents wondered why the elevator smelled like hot dogs every night. Some are more thoughtful than cheery, such as a note on the death of Benny Goodman in 1986. And:

August 30, 1987
If anyone still thinks this is not a crazy world, look at this.

In 1945, during World War II, there was an Army captain in California named Ronald Reagan. He was turning out public relations movies and still pictures for the military. He ordered an Army photographer to go out and take some pictures of women doing war work. The photographer found a young woman working in a factory making communications gear; she was quite attractive and her name was Norma Jean Dougherty. He took twenty-five pictures of her. They were so well received she left the factory and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe…

I never knew that – particularly that Reagan was involved. I love it. (Dougherty? I thought it was Baker. *Goodsearch* Oh – I didn’t realize she’d had that many marriages…)

But they aren’t all filler and light-hearted; in fact, most are opinion pieces on events in Washington and more localized politics. At first I wasn’t too thrilled by the then-timely now-contextless commentaries – but then I realized that a great many of them are still timely, and for the ones that aren’t it’s strangely fascinating to read about something that was screamingly urgent and vital twenty years ago which is barely a blip on most radar now. Perspective. And it’s oddly comforting to read something like this, from December 26, 1982:

We might all hope that 1983 is a good year in all respects, 1983 standing alone, because it doesn’t need any troubles of its own. It will inherit enough from 1982, and none of them will go away at midnight this Friday. The year 1983, for example, will inherit a recession spread around the world – 12 million unemployed, the first soup kitchens we have seen in a generation. It will inherit a Washington establishment spending close to $200 billion it does not have; a Congress that would like to bail itself out by raising taxes but can’t; a Social Security system that if not rescued will very soon run out of money; and various industries – automobiles, steel, and so on – devastated by imports at least equal in quality but lower in price. And more. Our town here, Washington, regardless of who is in power, cannot fix all of this. But after a generation of promising to solve every social economic ailment, it has led people to expect Washington solutions, and so it will try a number of them. The good news is that the mathematics of probabilities shows that if they try hard enough, sooner or later, by accident or otherwise, somebody will do something right. It does seem that it’s time, preferably in 1983, for the probabilities to go our way.

Make all the numbers, dates and dollar amounts, bigger: Things don’t really change. Comforting, and also scary.

August 3, 1986

Next week Congress will be voting to set a new and higher federal government debt limit, to give the Treasury power to borrow still more money.

Sound familiar?

And, in addition to talking about how the Presidential campaign idiotically began some 18 months prior to election day – a development I thought was more recent – there was this:

October 30, 1994

In the race for a Senate seat from California, it appears that the two candidates – Dianne Feinstein and Michael Huffington – will set a new world record for campaign spending. Before it’s all over, $40 million, maybe? Or more?…

- I found a reference stating that Huffington spent $28 million. $6.3 million was apparently his own money. Bob Schuman, Huffington’s campaign manager, said, “(Sen.) Dianne Feinstein has spent over $30 million since 1990 and we will never, in the course of this campaign, match her spending.” Just for comparison, the dreaded (or at least dreadful) Linda McMahon spent over $50 million last year (her ads running until I was wishing for her to come down with something painful and disfiguring) – and lost. (O God, spare me: she’s running again.) Connecticut’s a bit smaller than California, but the value of a dollar is down a good bit since the 90′s, so … I have no idea how that washes out.

…So to run in a big state you have to be rich or have rich and generous friends. He has his family’s oil money and he’s been spending it hand over fist. He’s spending more than $20 million to win a job that in six years – if he wins – will yield less than one-twentieth of what the job will cost him.

Is anyone who will make a financial deal like that qualified to handle the public’s money?

I wish I had said that. Wait.  I have – just not as well.

That happens quite a bit in this book. It’s sharp and smart and often funny, and surprisingly relevant. I was wishing for more like the boy in the elevator shaft, but what I did get was, in its way, more useful.

 

An open letter to those running for office …

I try to avoid politics. Once burned twice shy and all that, and I find the whole process queasy-making. But ’tis the season, and politics just can’t be avoided right now. So …
To all the state’s politicians:

- And make no mistake, whether you call yourself a Democrat, a Republican, an independent, insider or outsider, new blood or old guard, if you’re running for office you are a politician -

There are less than 14 days until midterm elections. With all the respect you as a body have earned over the last months: kindly shut up.

Political ads have been thick as flies on a corpse for months now – some of you have been running them since April. And, especially in recent weeks, they have been almost exclusively attack ads to one degree or another. What no one among you seems to understand is that when two opposing groups are accusing each other of lying, it not only becomes clear that someone is in fact not being honest – it seems obvous that no one can really be trusted.

The ads running every few minutes on television and radio are to varying degrees irritating, appalling, and/or nauseating – and expensive. What our “Founding Fathers” planned or believed or wanted or intended for this country is something much bandied about. No amount of persuasion will convince me that obscene amounts of money spent on empty advertisements consisting largely of political and personal attacks was what the Founding Fathers intended.

For the two main senatorial candidates alone, spending on ads has mounted into the tens of millions; one candidate has proudly proclaimed that she is willing to spend $50 million of her own money on the campaign. It’s her money to spend on what she wishes, of course, but that underscores another thing which everyone claims understanding of but which no one seems to truly grasp: people are hurting. Unemployment is high, people are in fear of losing their homes, charitable donations are down significantly. I can’t help but think about the impact that those tens of millions would have spread out among those in actual need. I can’t help but think that not a single candidate for office really understands what it’s like to worry about where their next mortgage payment is coming from, or their next meal. If they did, they couldn’t so cavalierly throw away so very much cash.

In fact, right about now the only commercial which would have an effect on me other than revulsion and a stabbing pain between the eyes would be one in which the candidate promised a bare-bones campaign, in which the majority of the money that would have been spent on ads would be donated instead to soup kitchens, homeless shelters, arts organizations, and animal shelters in their district. That person would earn my vote – and my respect. The hideously unavoidable ads running instead have the precise opposite effect. Because I can’t avoid you, and because I can’t believe any of you, and because your concentration is on all the wrong things, I’m beginning to hate all of you. I’ll vote on November 2, but it will truly be voting against and not for.

I am looking forward to the election, for no other reason than that all your political ads will go away and the innocuous commercials for cars and cold remedies will come back. Sadly, at this rate the presidential campaign ads, like all the Christmas displays appearing in stores in the past couple of weeks, will begin twenty minutes later.

Sincerely … or rather, in terms which might make sense to you -
“I’m Stewartry – and I approve this message.”