are we bought and paid for too

Perspective for your consideration …What does it look like when it’s fixed…?

McCain chooses Palin . . . Whether intended or not the McCain camp’s decision to choose Sarah Palin, the current Republican Governor of Alaska as the choice for the VP spot on the Republican Presidential ticket has produced a hail storm of discussion. This topic dominates national and local talk radio, TV news, newspaper headlines, internet discussion groups, weekly supermarket tabloids and coffee shop conversation.

What I find utterly fascinating is the speed at which reputed “valid” information was made available to the public, especially via the internet. No sooner had her name been mentioned and the internet was alive with “documentation” of all sorts, sizes, colors, descriptions about Ms. Palin. The barrage of so-called information was literally overwhelming, so much so, as to prevent anyone from standing back and taking a breath and questioning the validity of the information.

What “peaks” and tantalizes our interest is those reputed juicy tidbits about her personal life, her sex life, her personal drama/trauma stuff. The “stuff” our more popular TV shows portray week after week, keeping the audience on the edge of their seat to see what new provocatively stimulating “stuff” will be revealed in the next episode. Americans are voyeurs who choose to live vicariously through the lives of others.

This is for me a most interesting dichotomy as Americans yearn for the next revealing episode on the one hand while secretly maintaining a Puritan perspective about the human body, sex, nudity and human reproduction on the other. Enter on the American political scene a young woman, of reproductive age, not unattractive, with enough “baggage” for which motion picture executives salivate over, and presto the seeds exist to engage America in a prolonged love affair with her alleged proclivities.

Not a minute goes by that some new piece of “evidence” does not appear on the Internet about Ms. Palin as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. These range from photos showing her cradling a rifle with a scope on it in a bathing suit around a swimming pool. What inference are you to conjure up as you look at this photo…? And there are the ones of her daughter holding a child, but whose we are asked…? Might it be…? And she lied about that “bridge to nowhere,” say what, are you really asking me to believe that McCain, Biden or Obama have not done similarly…? This is politics folks, they can’t tell you and me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because if they did, we really would not vote for any of them.

American politics is getting you and me to believe the myth, to see truth in the mirage our candidate of choice presents, while on the other hand we are asked to look past the myth and mirage the enemy camp presents and see their ugly truth disclosed. Running for the office of President of the United States of America has been reduced to creating the greatest stage production of all time orchestrated to culminate at precisely the right moment in time reaching a heightened crescendo we willing take with us to the poll when we vote. We’re bought and paid for too.