Electioneering
The American election is far too important to be left to Americans.
Whoever said that politics is Hollywood for ugly people wasn’t around long enough to see how things work in America these days.
In America, it is becoming increasingly apparent that politics is Hollywood for the truly deranged, a sort of Theatre of The Absurd that it’s hard to believe actually leads to any valuable output in terms of the running of the country.
It’s very hard to summon the same excitement for David Cameron vs Ed Miliband when your choice is between a blow-up Etonian doll made of ham, or a someone who resembles Wallace without Gromit, and sounds like he constantly needs nasal decongestant. I can’t help but think that even in a fractured and fractious UK where the two parties and their supporters are increasingly not on speaking terms, our politics seems all too moderate by comparison.
Everything is bigger in America, and the politics are no exception.
Here it is entirely possible that a spray-tanned neo-Fascist in a bad wig, whose name is schoolboy slang for breaking wind, could somehow be leading the Republican race. Here, people are genuinely discussing the possibility that Donald Trump is in fact a Democratic Double Agent, planted by the Clintons to tear the Republican Party apart and ensure Hilary finally gets into the White House.
(So, he’s either the biggest twat on earth, the most selfless patriot America has ever produced, or the Clintons have a phenomenally filthy piece of gossip on him and are blackmailing him with it).
Here it’s entirely okay for the third person in a family to be running for President to call himself, without apparent irony, an outsider. Here, it is entirely acceptable for a second-generation American from a Cuban immigrant family to recommend shutting down American mosques, and anywhere else that Muslims congregate, effectively trying to deny one minority the freedoms that his own family probably enjoyed. Here, Governor Rick Perry recently turned up for an event honouring veterans on a Harley Davidson, in cowboy boots, and subsequently handed out puppies to children. Here, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz.
(Don’t even get me started on Sarah Palin).
Joe Biden is vice-president but has referred to an entire continent as ‘the nation of Africa’. Bernie Sanders looks like a scarecrow in a suit, and is so angry that I live in fear that his next rant will lead to him keeling over due to a heart attack, but but is still able to hold his own in a barbershop interview with Killer Mike from Run the Jewels.
Lying in campaign ads and stump speeches is not only allowed, but encouraged, and nobody seems to care. Here, despite the fact that he is pro-healthcare, pro-gun-control, and not in favour of big costly wars against nebulous words like ‘terror’, a substantial percentage of the population HATES Barack Obama.
The best piece of language in the American political lexicon is the phrase “low information voters”, which is just double-speak for ‘stupid people.’ A recent piece of stunt research revealed that 30% of Republican primary voters are in favour of bombing Agrabah, the fictional country from Aladdin — whilst this is impossible, it at least offers Disney a ‘franchise extension’ that would do something novel with the property rather than just another cash-spinning remake.
It’s very easy for enlightened Californians to be smug about this, but let’s remember that people out here voted in an Austrian bodybuilder with no political experience, whose campaign largely consisted of lines from his movies, as governor of a state whose GDP, if isolated from the rest of the US, would make it the eight-largest economy in the world.
As someone who’s a guest in this country, and so technically doesn’t have ‘skin in the game’, this would all be very funny if the stakes weren’t quite so high for the rest of the world.
I’ve been here for a year, and it has only deepened my admiration for America’s enduring optimism, its wide-armed approach to people of all colour and stripe, its sense of possibility, the size of its dreams & ideas, its willingness to soul-search as a nation, and its capacity for reinvention; it has also worsened my worries over its educational blind spots, its isolationism, its knee-jerk xenophobia, and of course, its attitude to live fire-arms.
There is no higher percentage of ignorant people here then there are in the UK, but voting for UKIP is far less important when the likely outcome is some bigot occupying a single seat in the party-politics-dominated parliament of a post-colonial power that is rapidly giving up on the idea of any kind of influence on the world stage.
America is the world’s foremost economic power, one of its biggest cultural exporters, it effectively owns the internet as large parts of the world’s population use it, and it’s still the world’s policeman. What’s going on here matters to everyone, not just to Americans. Everything is bigger in America, and that includes the problems that ensue elsewhere in the world when they elect the wrong leader.
The conclusion that this has lead me to is that the American election is far too important to be left to Americans.
The solution to this conundrum is, in fact, quite simple.
My rallying cry: I call on all good citizens of the world, particularly my European and British friends, to stop posting smug & high-minded things about Donald Trump on Facebook and Twitter, move to America, live in the Bible Belt or a swing state, apply for citizenship and vote for whichever candidate is the most sane at the next election.
November 2016 is just around the corner, but 2020 will be here sooner than you think.
