Today is garbage day — time to load up all the week’s trash into the back of my pickup, and drive it down the hill to where the garbage truck can pick it up. During this chore, I flipped on the radio and listened to the news…and I heard this story, which struck me as a crystalline example of all the silliness and unseriousness of current American politics. The story:
Senator Barack Obama used to be known to his friends and employers as “Barry” Obama. His birth certificate says Barack, but that name was apparently a little too alien to be easily accepted. So Barack turned himself into “Barry", and so he was known for years, as a law professor and as a Senator. Recently, however, “Barack” is apparently striking the public as exotic and kind of cool, so the Senator is transforming himself back into Barack — asking the press, his friends, and his co-workers to refer to him by that name.
There are two “sillies” here.
The first one is that a candidate should think that his name would make any difference at all to his political success. It’s a very loud statement that he believes form matters more than substance. That’s silly. That’s unserious politics. And that is, unfortunately, quite typical for a national-level American politician today.
The second silly is that the candidate is probably right. The American electorate probably does react to someone’s name; there probably is some measurable level of impact to his appeal to voters based on his “new” name. That’s silly. That’s unserious. And that is, unfortunately, all too typical of the American electorate’s participation in the political process.
Decades of dumbed-down schools and lower average achievement, a half-century of television sucking the IQ from our population’s brains, thirty five years of rapid drift towards socialism — we’re reaping our reward now.
If this foreshadows the kind of political discourse we can expect in the 2008 Presidential campaign, I may just tune out all together, and dedicate this site to slide rules!
Update: Just a few minutes after I posted this, I read a news story with this little tidbit: the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives has deliberated on a profound problem facing America, and they have come up with an answer. The problem? Representatives coming in for their first term of office were traditionally called “freshmen” Representatives. This sexist, biased, and obviously offensive term. The solution, arrived at after appropriate hearings and debate: newly-elected Representatives are heretofore to be known as “new Representatives.
This is the kind of issue that our legislators think belongs at the top of their agenda. They don’t want to waste their time on issues like immigration, crime, health care, social security, or the war in Iraq. No sirree, our lawmakers are gonna spend their time on important things!
Sheesh. You just can’t make up something worse than the reality…
