Boy am I pleased with the election results. Not because I answered that little quiz I took Tuesday at the polls correctly, but because I became morbidly obese over the weekend and got stuck in my bathtub shortly after voting and my asshole roommates think it's so funny that they won't help me out or tell me who Team USA drafted at starting quarterback (but I hope you're happy, America). I'm happy with the overall election result because it resulted in the election being all over.
It is great to see democracy in action. It's great to see both young and old pausing at the polls to add their voice to a collective shout of THIS GUY!"" But it is not great to spend a beautiful day at the Terrace listening to three prim academic-types bicker about how stupid Jane is for thinking Ohio will fall to McCain. As painful as it was for me on Monday morning, I would rather be forced to eavesdrop on two guys narrating every detail of their ""majorly epic"" beer pong game last weekend to the girl they both like (which, by the way, is the worst possible way to seem interesting). At least those bry-guys had fewer pretensions about how important their conversation was.
With election '08 officially in the books, I now look forward to overhearing strangers once again talk about things that already happened and no longer having to avoid people with clipboards, unless they're the ones asking if I have five minutes to spare for the environment.
Some may say that election fatigue is an inevitable symptom of a healthy democracy. They'll say that wherever you have a population passionate about its presidential preference, the attention paid to the race will be so severe that freedom-hating saps like me are bound to be worn out by the constant pounding from new poll data and sidewalk chalkings. I'll concede the point, but only to a point. What annoys me most about election season is not a symptom of a giant democratic hard-on but of a larger aspect of American society, which is our unexplainable preponderance for making projections.
I can get my head around old people trying to project their future earnings and crap. I can understand why some folks try to forecast the weather (though I can't see how they already know we're going to get 100 inches of snow). I draw the line when I see that my boy Portis is gonna net 89 yards and a score on Saturday's BottomLine. I'm sure there's math involved with it all. I'll bet whoever does it has a system. It's still dumb.
Whatever happened to the give-it-a-wait-and-see approach? CNN could have covered a lot more news this year had they began and ended every election segment by Wolf with, ""Well folks, the election is still not today, so if you want to find out who's going to win it, you'll just have to give it the ol' wait and see."" Then they could move on to the real headlines, like ""Aniston calls Owen Wilson 'brave'"" or ""Twinkies get slimmed down."" Instead we get someone with a magic finger telling us what shade of blue Colorado will be on the 4th.
Projections lull the predicted winners into complacency and goad the losers on to victory. If those projected electoral vote totals I saw every time I entered Internet-world were wrong, they'd have brought us nothing but a load of bitter, disheartened Democrats crying foul and a hefty wave of brain-drain bound for Canada. And we all know there's nothing more unpleasant than a bunch of bitchy crestfallen liberals; at least gun-toting conservative sore-losers are funny to watch.
Humans have been trying to predict the future since the past started, so maybe I should get with the program. So in celebration of the end of the election season, I will follow the media's cue and make a bold projection of my own, one that's sure to console the sorry losers of the election and sober the ecstatic winners. I project that whoever has won by now (Editor's note: Obama did), he will flake on his campaign promises enough to disappoint his fan-base and screw up enough to justify his opponents' convictions, so that in a few years time everything will have evened out. That sounds putrefyingly cynical, but the great thing about projections is that they're always wrong. So I just saved the next presidency, you wait and see!
Heard the forecast was for snow today. E-mail dhottinger@wisc.edu if it didn't.
