I wanted to talk about an interesting phenomenon that has occurred as we sit stagnant in the middle of a presidential election ( yes, I mean middle, we started over a year ago, really.) America has developed a John Hughes approach to our presidential election. For those of you who don't know, Hughes is a Major motion picture director that gained popularity in America in the late 80's. He is responsible for a string of films about groups' high school age and 20' somethings living through the tribulations and often quirky experiences of growing up in America. He has a reputation for making very stereotypical characters, i.e. the snobby girl, the nerd, the football jock, the foreigner, the bad boy. America's political landscape too closely resembles his approach to memorable characters. We(and by we, I mean mostly America's news media,) Have taken the people who are running to be elected the person responsible for the most influential nation on the earth, and trivialized and stereotyped them into the most shallow and basic frame of a memorable John Hughes Character. This is in keeping with the modern American tradition of social apathy, short attention spans and . What was I talking about? I am kidding. Before I begin to name the characters, I want to point out that I am not meaning to be racist, or sexist, but I am going to play off of the current theme in much of the country of ignorantly assigning an identifiable label on the candidate without considering their actual ideas.
We have, for our viewing pleasure, The Woman, The Black Man, The Ken Doll, The Crazy old man, The crazy Latin guy, America's Mayor, The War Vet, The Mormon, And the movie star. In keeping with my last blog, I named only the 'front running candidates', as those who haven't found a stereotypical niche have seemed to fade out of the foreground of CNN, FOX news and MSNBC.
In conjunction with this classification of candidates, Many American's have also subscribed to an absurd and embarrassing voting outline that has little intellectual or logical base to it. I am speaking on voting for the character, not the candidate or his views. An example would be the often heard "I am voting for XXXXX because America is ready for a YYYYY President" Inserting Candidates name in the X variable and a Race, Religion or Gender into the Y variable. Why would you vote for a candidate based on race or gender? How is that different than the negatively viewed historical policy of Rich White Christian Men Voting for Rich White Christian Men? One of my lead candidates is an American Minority, but I am not voting for him because of his race, Contrariwise, I won't vote for Clinton, but it isn't because of her gender.
The other extreme of voting strategy is to vote along party lines. I won't comment too much on this, although I have a lot to say, Perhaps Ill save it for another blog. I will say this though. Look where partisan voting got in the last 7 years.
We have, for our viewing pleasure, The Woman, The Black Man, The Ken Doll, The Crazy old man, The crazy Latin guy, America's Mayor, The War Vet, The Mormon, And the movie star. In keeping with my last blog, I named only the 'front running candidates', as those who haven't found a stereotypical niche have seemed to fade out of the foreground of CNN, FOX news and MSNBC.
In conjunction with this classification of candidates, Many American's have also subscribed to an absurd and embarrassing voting outline that has little intellectual or logical base to it. I am speaking on voting for the character, not the candidate or his views. An example would be the often heard "I am voting for XXXXX because America is ready for a YYYYY President" Inserting Candidates name in the X variable and a Race, Religion or Gender into the Y variable. Why would you vote for a candidate based on race or gender? How is that different than the negatively viewed historical policy of Rich White Christian Men Voting for Rich White Christian Men? One of my lead candidates is an American Minority, but I am not voting for him because of his race, Contrariwise, I won't vote for Clinton, but it isn't because of her gender.
The other extreme of voting strategy is to vote along party lines. I won't comment too much on this, although I have a lot to say, Perhaps Ill save it for another blog. I will say this though. Look where partisan voting got in the last 7 years.