November 10, 2008

Election Sights and Sounds I Will Not Miss

The election is over. The cheers and tears of that historic November night are now just a lingering joyful memory. The golden light of a new dawn is breaking over America, chasing the shadows of fear from the darkest corners of a hopeful world.

And Sarah Palin is back home in Wasilla, working on her new eBay ad:

“Slightly Used Designer Wardrobe For Immediate Sale. I Accept Cash Only – In Small Unmarked Bills!”

Now we have some time to catch our collective breath from America’s latest quadrennial political extravaganza, and I would like to take this opportunity to spend a few moments reflecting on what just happened. And while I’m at it, I’d like to lay out a few things that I could really live without for awhile.

First off, I would be a lot happier if I never heard the word “Warshington” again. It’s bad enough that for the past eight years we’ve been subjected to “nuc-u-lar” delivered with a West Texas drawl, particularly since it was coming from a president of the United States who was born in Connecticut, educated at a boarding school in Massachusetts and attended Yale.

Likewise, I would prefer not to be called “My Friend” any more by anyone who is not actually my friend. Not that I would not like to have John McCain for a friend – I think that would probably be great. I’ve admired the guy for many years.

But if I ran into him in a pub, I would probably stick with calling him “Sir” and ask him to call me Mike, at least until we were on our second pint of stout. With any kind of luck, we might work our way up to “Ol’ Buddy, Ol’ Pal” by the end of the evening.

On the subject of admiring John McCain, am I the only one who cringed at his body language throughout the campaign? Every time he had to fling a handful of scripted slime at Barack Obama, his face would contort and his eyes would blink like he had gravel in his contact lenses. I have a real sense that this is a man who was not all that comfortable with his (hopefully temporary) excursion into life on the Dark Side.

We were also subjected to a seemingly endless (was it only eight weeks?) stream of language like:

“A vice president has a really great job because, not only are they there to support the president’s agenda, they’re like the team member, the teammate to that president, but also, they’re in charge of the United States Senate, so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family, and his classroom, and it’s a great job and I look forward to having that job.”

As hard as I try, I simply cannot come up with any sort of punch line about Governor Palin’s excursions into the wildest frontiers of high school civics and English syntax that are any funnier than just repeating what she actually says. That kind of pisses me off – I get paid for punch lines.

Besides, she says “nuc-u-lar” too. Aaarrrrggggh!

Of course, Joe Biden had his prime moments. Every time he lowered his voice an octave and said, “mark my words,” you could hear the entire Obama campaign screaming, “No! Whatever you do, please don’t mark his words!”

But it’s over now, and we can relax for a while. In a few weeks President Obama will take office, and then we can all start writing jokes about his ears.

In the meantime I feel pretty good about what just happened in our country. In 1959, when I was a kid living in Hawaii, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came out and spoke to the legislature of our newly-formed state. He finished his speech by quoting a prayer he attributed to “. . . an old Negro slave preacher:”

“Lord, we ain't what we want to be, and we ain't what we ought to be, and we ain't what we gonna be, but thank God, we ain’t what we was.”

Amen.

Copyright ©2008 Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group.

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