O My America: Presidential Politics as Airline Food

by Lawrence Bush
How can there be a foreign policy debate between the only two men who are competing to be the next President of the United States that doesn’t even offer a whisper of the words, “global warming”? That doesn’t even speak about AIDS in Africa and Asia? That doesn’t mention the imminent worldwide crisis of clean water? That doesn’t bemoan the slaughter of elephants for ivory in Kenya, or even utter the word “extinction”? That doesn’t talk about rape and war?
Do Mr. and Ms. Joe and Jill Shmo in Ohio really loathe the planet so much that they’d rather hear statistics about China’s currency manipulation than about the destruction of coral reefs and the collapse of fisheries throughout the world’s oceans? Would they really rather spend time hearing politicians calculate what time of day it was that the CIA decided that the killings in Libya were terrorist acts than hear them calculate how our world is going to drastically lower its carbon footprint?
They are packaged like airline food, these candidates. You know it’s going to be mediocre, you know it’s going to come in a miniature tray, you know it’s going to be the same as last time, you know that you’re going to have only three choices (and one of them won’t be available), and you wish to God that you could have a home-cooked meal but you’re 30,000 feet up in the air and you’re hungry.
I swear, if Barack Obama were a leader instead of a vote-for-me politician, he’d be beating Romney by 10 points. But even on the Daily Show last week, where he had every opportunity to get real, he did nothing but repeat the hypnotizing mantras that have been drilled into his head. The Democrats have yet to learn that as long as they are as robotic and as conservative as they can possibly be, the Republicans, who actually ARE robotic and ARE conservative, will beat them.
I’m ready for the worst, goddamn it.