Field of dweebs

Political commentator and consultant Paul Begala once said that politics is “show business for ugly people.” I want to send this guy a cake.

His observation has been true for decades now, but it wasn’t always the case. When this quaint little republic was born in earnest, politics were a straightforward affair: You elected a person, they were your representative, and they voted the way you wanted, or else you tossed the bum out on his pleated-pantalooned keester. Easy peasy, pass the guacamole.

When money corrupted the political system, with Congress capitulating to corporate cash rather than its constituents, it turned into something else entirely. America ceased to be a functioning democracy, and the political arena became a circus sideshow of posturing, preening nincompoops spouting any number of substanceless platitudes to keep themselves locked firm in the public eye. Politics was the country’s first reality show, only there’s probably more wit in an airing of “The Bachelor” than there is in your typical presidential debate.

Clowns, the lot of them. Which brings me a sick kind of joy.

Anyone got any popcorn?

Were I in any way a decent human being, I’d be deeply concerned about the current race. Brow furrowed, I’d watch in consternation as one brain-damaged chimpanzee after another made rounds of ridiculous promises while the spittle spewed from their lips. “I’ll build a giant, gold-plated, diamond-encrusted wall along the border and have it paid for by the three-eyed bounty hunters from Gorgon-5, who owe us a favor!” “I’ll scare off the terrorists by constructing an 80-foot statue of a ruler-wielding Catholic nun shaking her head disapprovingly!” Sure, sure. And I’ll grow wings and poop Lucky Charms.

It’s not the promises themselves that are alarming this go-’round, though. It’s the blithering lobotomy patients who are making them. This election cycle’s contestants boast all the intellectual heft of an old toaster oven. Forget their policy proposals and whether you agree with them; the views of Candidate X might align perfectly with your own, but none of that matters if he lacks the cognitive wherewithal to tie his own shoes. History is littered with idiots, but never before have so many of them been in serious contention for the nation’s top post. Watching them jockey for position is like seeing a litter of cats scrambling over themselves to suckle at their mother’s teat, except cats have better foreign policy proposals.

This is what passes for my incisive political analysis, by the way. A Peabody Award can’t be far behind.

So this is who we are now, a nation that rewards dunderheads. Unfortunate to consider that this isn’t overly surprising. We’ve been tending in this direction for a while now, what with our proclivity to scoff at expertise and reward those who “shoot from the hip” and “tell it like it is.” If a scientist devotes the entirety of his or her professional career to studying climate change, amasses decades’ worth of fact-based evidence, and then makes an announcement that human activity is threatening habitation on the planet, the public reaction is, “Pfft! What does Miss Know-It-All Science Lady know about the issue? Keep reading books, nerd!” Meanwhile, a know-nothing politician with tangible interests in the oil industry tells the public that solar energy is a threat to jobs, and the reaction is, “Hey, ‘jobs!’ I know that word! I admire your lack of education, sir. Give ‘em hell!”

We live in a topsy-turvy bizarro world where right is wrong, up is down, and Pauly Shore movies are nuanced and insightful. Historically, great civilizations have sometimes tripped over their own shoelaces on the road to progress; western Europe had to slog through the Dark Ages before the Renaissance restored public faith in art and science. Take a look at the current landscape, though, and it’s natural to wonder if we can find a way out of this particular rut. Our fractured leadership reflects a fractured society in which everyone is entrenched in their own niche. Instead of coming together every four years to collectively choose a national direction, everyone identifies with a sub-group, or a sub-sub-group, and sequesters themselves in their own comfortable little pocket. We’re like moles who burrow into the ground and never come to the surface to compare notes with the other moles. Not that moles keep notes. They lack opposable thumbs and have brains the size of Fruit Loops. But enough about moles.

This fragmentation was happening long before the Internet, but virtual culture has taken the political process by the scruff of its neck and held it up to a funhouse mirror. There’s a home for just about any mirco-opinion that can be conceived. There are online communities dedicated to papier mache hats, for Pete’s sake. You can spend hours on a message board swapping recipes for lentil soup. Heck, even Mike Huckabee supporters can find solace in each others’ bits and bytes, and Huckabee has fewer fans than the L.A. Clippers. They’re a basketball team, by the way.

Now it would be pointless to rant and rave without offering some kind of solution, so here it is: Place the presidential contenders in front of a panel of judges so we can watch them get blasted for their inability to sing “Even Flow” by Pearl Jam. Then make them go through a Gladiator-style obstacle course in which they have to use monkey bars to span a 10-foot-deep pit populated with fire-breathing alligators. When the field gets whittled down to two, they can arm-wrestle for the Oval Office live on pay-per-view television.

It’s not the most civilized means of picking a commander-in-chief. But considering the divided and contentious race we’ve seen so far, it seems like the next logical step.