Next year, we hit the dreaded 2012, and whether the world ends or not, it’s bound to be interesting. The Olympics may be in London, but the biggest rat race of them all will be on our side of the pond, in Washington D.C.
The first primary voting is still five months away, but the slew of Republican candidates are already lacing up for the grueling journey ahead. Some have already quit, and others have jumped in late. But they’re all in this together now, and hilarity is about to ensue, or so I thought.
I remember the lunacy of the primary lead-up in ’07 with fond recollection. I derived a lot of entertainment value out of the entire thing, imagining the candidates fighting each other as if in a Mario Kart race, with Romney, McCain and Huckabee tossing banana peels among themselves hoping to slip the others up, and Ron Paul in the back keeping his fingers crossed for a blue-spiked shell. Even with the Democrats, the Barack vs. Hilary boxing match with John Edwards and his $400 haircut insisting that he was still relevant was really funny. As long as all these politicians were busy arguing, they weren’t actually doing anything to screw up the country. I could afford to sit back and laugh.
This time around, I’m just a bit worried, and it’s not even the candidates who are really worrying me; it’s the audience.
Last week, there were two debates within five days of each other, the first just up the road in Simi Valley and the second in Tampa Bay, Fla. On Wednesday I was only slightly paying attention when NBC News’ Brian Williams posed a question to Texas Gov. Rick Perry “Your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times— ” to which the crowd applauded. A friend of mine tweeted, “What is this, the Roman Empire?” They enthusiastically cheered the deaths of 234 people, some of whom may not have deserved it.
The point of the question was to ascertain whether Perry ever lost sleep wondering if he might have executed someone who was innocent. The question, while failing to mention the name of Cameron Todd Willingham, was clearly influenced by him. Willingham was executed Feb. 17, 2004, on evidence many experts believed to be faulty. When Perry refused to reopen the case with the admittance of testimony that might have exonerated him, a fair amount of media attention followed.
The following Sunday night, during Monday Night Football commercial breaks, I was checking out the Tampa debate when I got hit with another gem of audience participation. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer was asking Paul about a hypothetical situation in which a man without health insurance goes into a coma and needs medical care. When he arrived at the theoretical point and asked, “Are you saying that society should just let him die?” While Paul emphatically responded, “No,” a sizeable group of the audience interjected loudly with “Yeah!” Former Florida Rep. Alan Grayson agreed with the previous sentiment of my friend, saying, “Bread and circuses, without the bread.” Even Perry later said, “I was a bit taken aback by that myself.”
For the second time that week, I felt extremely uncomfortable watching. The debates I used to laugh at were now deadly serious, emphasis on deadly. This was now twice that I had turned off the television unable to think of anything other than the bloodthirsty cries of the crowd. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t find a way to make this funny: my ultimate defense mechanism, and the only thing that allows me to tolerate politics in the first place.
It began to dawn on me that these primaries were not just political dog shows, but an interactive process. The people are equally involved as the politicians. As small as those groups of people might be, they were still represented enough to go on live television and momentarily hijack the proceedings.
What were they even thinking? Were they? The scary part is that those people vote, and those people influence the candidates that want those votes. If this kind of thing continues to occur, it may become contagious.
I’m not even all that upset that Republicans support capital punishment or oppose social safety nets (big surprises there), but the fact that a part of their base is actually energized by killing people disturbs me. I usually like to believe that those I disagree with are still good people with good intentions behind their beliefs, but I fail to see how there can be any good intentions behind these outbursts.
Perhaps I just need to stop watching these debates. I may have to if I ever want to laugh again. I wonder if “How I Met Your Mother” is on?
