No Thanks

I didn’t finish the thought in my last post.

What are elections? What are they for? The quaint theory is that they’re a chance to choose between different policy options, after a debate between competing views.

But the long-ago charge against the presidential candidate Mitt Romney, that monster, was that he intended to ban contraception and turn women into HANDMAIDS!!!!! And now the charge in 2024 is that Donald Trump wants to, stop me if you’ve heard this one, ban contraception and turn women into HANDMAIDS!!!!!

It’s weird that he forgot to do this during his first term, but he’s really for sure going to do it this time!

And in fact, if Trump returns to the White House, women won’t even be allowed to leave the house anymore without the permission of their commanders, and women who have cancer won’t be allowed to have chemotherapy, and women will have to report their menstruation to the federal government and show their period passports at police checkpoints!

This is all true, because I saw it on the Internet (click the link to watch):

None of this is politics. And the single thing I find myself wondering is whether or not we’ll ever have politics again, or if we’ve now just descended into a permanent recycling of AWFL psychopathology and ritual fear-chanting. Presidential election 2044: DOES THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE WANT TO BAN CONTRACEPTION AND TURN WOMEN INTO hAnDmAIdSssSSSSssss!?!?!?!?

Does this ever stop?

I have fond memories of reporters asking presidential candidates if they supported federal ethanol subsidies. Remember when elections had stuff like that in them?

TRUMP IS OBSESSED WITH CONTROLLING MY VAGINA, your least favorite college friend explains over her fourth glass of wine. This election might be an unpublished chapter from a Mary McCarthy novel.

Entirely aside from voting, and the obvious questions about the fairness and legitimacy of the way ballots are counted, my question is about the discourse and the performance of campaign season, the purpose of all the months of alleged “debate.” Presidential election cycles are becoming years-long media obsessions, and they’re now almost entirely centered on vaginas and mean bullies. It’s like we’ve all been cornered by a drunk and unusually stupid preschool teacher. Google some of the pathetic shit that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has been gibbering lately, if you feel the need — I decline to get into it any further, except to wonder what time the nurse gives him his pills so he can cry in a corner and masturbate himself to sleep.

Our elections have been emptied of politics in favor of an endless cycle of Lifetime movie-of-the-week psychodrama. Actual pro-Harris PAC advertisement:

Vaginas vaginas vaginas, they explained, holding the flashlight under their chins.

Emptied. Our culture has been emptied.