Politics: The Low Art of Repulsive Noise

abort, abort, abort!

We’re confused: California keeps making it easier to vote, but fewer and fewer people are doing it. Vote-by-mail ballots automatically land in everyone’s mailbox, but a significant majority of registered voters shrug and ignore the whole thing.

While Californians tune out, California has a long series of increasingly serious problems: capital flight, population loss, a metastasizing budget deficit, decaying infrastructure, the endless growth of homelessness, the increasing lethality of drug-centered homelessness, and on and on. “The state of California currently has the highest homeless population, with about 161,548 homeless people. This number represents 27.89% of the total homeless population in the United States.” As the state declines and decays, most of the population walks away from the alleged mechanism for producing a course correction.

A report this morning at the news website CalMatters offers a first hint about the causes of that declining voter interest: “The latest official tally from the Secretary of State’s office shows that 4.8 million ballots have been counted from California’s primary, with 2.5 million still to go.” The election was six days ago. The certification of the election — the end of counting and the announcement of a final tally — is scheduled for April 11.

So you vote, and then four or five weeks later they begin to nail down the result and let your know what you allegedly voted for. Oh, and: “As expected, the votes being counted after primary day are trending more Democratic and younger.” Weeks after election day, new ballots will still be being counted — and my goodness, they trend more Democratic as the weeks go on. I can’t imagine why anyone would lose faith in that process. Stop with your conspiracy theories!

But there’s something else going on that makes voting a repellent chore. Remember the population losses, the out-of-control budget deficit, the growing homeless population, and the appalling decay of our streets and freeways, and then let’s go look at the flood of campaign mailers that landed in my mailbox over the last couple of months. How did candidates for the state legislature address all of those serious problems? Here, look:

And look at this one closely:

Former Republican Yvonne Yiu, who is so disgusting that her bland unsmiling face appears in black and white, didn’t vote for a resolution supporting abortion rights. She did that, you see, as a member of the Monterey Park City Council, which considered a resolution in support of Roe v. Wade. That was probably the decisive vote that tipped the scales, and Justice Alito ran around the building shouting to his colleagues that Monterey Park City Councilmember Yvonne Yiu is no longer a barrier to our decision! Legally, suburban city council resolutions are like a steering wheel for the nation’s highest court, so councilmembers have to stay focused on the big picture. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the vice-mayor of Alhambra “got to work.” That’s what city governments do: they engage the Supreme Court, like a tennis player on the other side of the net, Justice Alito locked in battle with Vice-Mayor Pérez.

So state-level politics is that we have decaying freeways and a $73 billion deficiABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION ABORTION PLANNED PARENTHOOD

This is somewhere beyond the realm of pro-choice politics, a monomaniacal devotion that borders on becoming an occult faith. Sasha Renée Pérez will personally strangle every goddamn one of those babies with her own bare hands, folks, you can trust this bold leader to stand tall for our shared values. There’s a scene in which Gregory Peck stands on the back of a giant whale and drives a harpoon into its back, screaming about lashing out at it from hell’s heart:

Somebody with the necessary skills needs to turn that whale into a baby, and impose the faces of Democratic politicians on the image of the lunatic with the harpoon. “With my last breath I spit hate at thee!”

Now, let’s look in on another race. Los Angeles County is similarly troubled, with the same decaying infrastructure and structural deficits. The sheriff’s department is short about 1,200 deputies, leading to dropped responses and constant mandatory overtime to keep up patrol staffing; recently, the family of a murdered deputy filed a lawsuit alleging that he was killed because he was too fatigued to protect himself after many months with 100+ hours of forced overtime at a chronically understaffed station. So. What topics are at the center of the campaign for county supervisor in my district? You’ll just absolutely never guess.

Kathryn Barger, by the way, is a Republican. So you see how important that is.

Deficits, homelessness, staffing shortages, infrastructure problems, the whole array of serious problems that show up in the actual daily lives of Californians…

Abortion abortion abortion abortion abortion abortion abortion abortion abortion abortion abortion abortion abortion wait why aren’t you voting?

Politics is about distraction and deflection. It’s meaningless, empty, repellent noise. And we wonder why people decline to participate.