It has all grown down, so perversely and grotesquely backwards that one wonders and worries from where relief might come. Who can lead us back to a better place if there’s no one left who has been there?
Student elections in middle and junior high schools reasonably mandate that candidates stick to their qualifications, stress their strengths; students’ campaigns shall include no attacks on their opponents.
What better way to instill a strong and noble sense of civility, diplomacy, statesmanship and right-headed public comportment in newly turned teens?
Yeah, kids, save the childish cheap shots, the name-calling, the putdowns and simpleminded low blows for when you’re an adult. That kind of campaigning is best left to US presidential candidates.
’Tis the season. Again. The political TV ads underscore the depressing nature of a society and civilization in steady, sense-defying decline.
It brings to mind the post-WWI politics that consumed Italy and Germany, when dozens of political parties were known not for their better and lasting-good platforms, but for whom, among countless choices, they hated most. How’d that turn out?
A recent ad for President Obama’s re-election features Mitt Romney, holding a microphone and strolling about as if caught up in a last-call lounge act or a karaoke dare gone bad, singing, mostly off-key, “America the Beautiful.”
As Romney sings, graphics appear, all of which imply that Romney actually hates America; that his personal, fortune-sustaining business practices are predicated on leaving the US destitute; that the Republican candidate for president is a traitor.
Thus, the ad mocks Romney as a bad American, and, worse, a lousy singer. To any fairminded adult viewer of any political bent, the ad is aimed at the simpleminded, a stab at stirring the visceral juices, a shot to the gut instead of an appeal to the head.
But most upsetting is that the ad begins with Obama’s appearance, during which our president identifies himself, then says, “I approved this message.”
Why? Why would he approve an ad that identifies him as the hopeful beneficiary of such a transparently juvenile message? Was there no one to talk him out of this ad, or did the president’s advisors and strategists talk him into it?
No doubt, the Romney campaign is loading up on undignified TV messages of its own.
But if dignity any longer counted, Romney wouldn’t have openly solicited the blessing of clownish narcissist Donald Trump. Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain wouldn’t have made campaign appearances on one of Vince McMahon’s sleaze-for-kids pro wrestling telecasts.
Dignity? Our oh-so-hip President, newly elected, jumped on the Jay Leno show to eagerly make a Special Olympics crack — ugh, what years ago gratefully began to fade as “retard jokes.”
Somehow, dignity is no longer a presidential qualification. Dignity has been lost to no-better-idea campaigns for the nation’s highest offices. Dignity is for the campaigns of seventh- and eighth-graders.
The mere notion of trying to put (and keep) one’s best foot in front — appeal to voters’ higher-mindedness rather than to those who value trash talk — has been lost to campaign strategists whom credible candidates for the presidency of the United States should reject as a matter of being beneath them, not to mention the United States!
Therein lies the problem: Nothing’s beneath anyone anymore. And no one’s willing to even risk taking the high road, which is where the “undecided” tend to linger, hoping for — desperate for — a sign.
Modern presidential campaign strategies are now regularly featured at big-time sports events. The crowd, once inclined to cheer for their team (“Let’s go, Lions!”) is now more inclined to chant obscene put-downs of the opponent (“Bears, s – – – k! Bears s – – -k!”).
Politically and socially, it doesn’t represent a shift to the left or right, just straight down.