The Despair That is Election Day

In my American Presidents class we have been discussing the election week in and week out.  The more that we talk about it the more depressed I get.  Most of the people in class have very strong, emotional convictions on who the right guy is.  And the more they talk about the more it is apparent that they have no fucking clue what they are talking about.

Throughout the whole exercise I feel increasingly morose about the whole exercise.  They repeat the same platitudes and promises that anyone with 30 seconds and access to Google would know to be complete and utter bullshit.

To make matter worse,  I have come to learn that there has never been the utopian Nation of Liberty that most libertarian types insist existed before FDR.  After reading the book on Jefferson, the one President that I was certain was the intellectual father of liberty, I simply learned that he was an opportunist that was more than willing to use the reigns of power to serve his own ends if he felt they were justified.

From fighting an “illegal war” to evil rationalizations on slavery he nearly popped that last vestiges of idealism I had left.  Jefferson is really no different than any of the rest of them.  I then started Sobel’s book on Calvin Coolidge - Coolidge: An American Enigma - it started off really well.  Coolidge is really an anti-politician in so many ways, but in the end he really was an opportunist – fighting for government intervention when it suited him.  That really was the end of it for me.

Now I think that Coolidge would be a vast, vast mountain of an improvement over what we are going to get, the fact is that we don’t really get that choice.  It’s a choice between really bad and pretty catastrophic with the sad truth that I haven’t quite figured out who is who.

I had every intention of walking into the voting booth and just voting on the local referendums, but am now thinking that a vote for some President other than Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum is more likely to register the greatest amount of dissatisfaction.  I know next to nothing about Bob Barr and truth be told I probably would be less likely to vote for him if I did.  But in this world where the answer to every question is “Government” at least he has to be directionally correct.

Right?

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