Signs O’ The Times

Yesterday was the first workday after rolling the clocks back to Standard Time, which has both good and bad qualities from my perspective. On the one hand it feels a bit more civilized to start the driving leg of my commute while the sun is coming up, as opposed to while it’s still pitch black pre-dawn. On the other hand, that shift means that when I get off the Metro and go wait for the bus in the evening, it’s already getting dark, or at least too dark to read. I’m forever justifying my long-ass commute by playing up how much reading I get done, so I notice when something cuts into that time. I usually only lose five or ten minutes waiting for a bus, depending on how fast they’re running and how long the line is on any given day, but that can add up to reading fifty or so fewer pages a week or maybe one entire book in the course of a month. Which is utterly, utterly trivial but something I obsess about nonetheless. The loss of daylight is also a reminder that the weather is going to be a factor soon, too. First it gets too dark to read at the bus stop, and then too cold, when even wearing gloves doesn’t help much and I feel that if I don’t jam my hands in my pockets I might lose a few knuckles to frostbite. Winter is not my favorite season.

But hey, it’s not winter yet, it is in fact the height of that man-made abomination, Election Season. Of all the things I do not want this blog to be, “political” leads the pack, so I will keep this brief and I will avoid talking about anything remotely substantive.


Mostly I just want to bitch about how mentally exhausting the Virginia gubernatorial campaign has been for me. (I also want to use goofily archaic words like “gubernatorial”.) The general sentiment seems to be that this race is hugely significant, but I don’t quite buy that. Virginia is a traditionally red state that went for Obama, so the gubernatorial election one year later is being cast as a referendum on the presidency. I am as big a fan of both oversimplification and exaggeration as you are likely to find, and I think that reading of Virginia’s state elections is a bunch of crap. My beloved (or at least strongly beliked) adopted Commonwealth has had a Democrat in the governor’s seat since 2001 despite being by and large a more conservative patch of the old U.S.A. quilt. If it’s time for the pendulum to swing back the Republican way, it’s time, and this may or may not have anything to do with President Obama. It could represent people’s disillusionment with the lack of Change™ they’re seeing or Hope™ they’re feeling, or it could stem from people’s Irrational Fears™ of unreal things they perceive Obama as being associated with. Call me naïve, but I think it’s much more likely that the outcome of the Virginia election will have more to do with the actual gubernatorial candidates themselves than with the POTUS. Personally I think the Democrats’ candidate Creigh Deeds is pretty weak, without much in the way of a record or personal charisma, and on the other side the Republican hopeful Bob McDonnell is a bog-standard Republican. They’ve both run fairly negative campaigns, uninspired and uninspiring. Neither one of them represents anything particularly new or important, so I believe people will end up voting for the party they usually vote for (or against the party they usually vote against) and the only conclusion it will be fair to draw is how people feel about what’s been going on in Richmond. Maybe the two gubernatorial candidates are such blank ciphers that people really will be projecting their feelings about Obama onto the way they vote today, but I’m not convinced.

It’s not the insipid candidates that have worn me out, though; it’s the non-stop barrage of phone calls generated by both campaigns. Robo-calls are one of the worst signs of western civilization’s decline, I think we can all agree on that, but it’s fairly easy and painless to hang up on them. I used to feel a small twinge of guilt hanging up on a live campaign volunteer, but that’s been ground out of me over the past month or so. The worst, in my opinion, are the pollsters. I think that polls are the most detrimental thing to democracy and I really don’t understand why we haven’t abolished them.

I had a conversation once with a friend of mine about the nature of large-scale elections and whether or not any one person’s vote matters when the scale of total votes cast gets up into the millions. Technically I suppose it wasn’t so much of a conversation as the two of us preening intellectually in front of our other friends there at the restaurant, and it escalated into a shouting match pretty quickly, until I tried to refute something my friend was asserting by saying “But that’s just reductio ad absurdum!” and he retorted “YOU’RE reductio ad absurdum!” He did it without a shred of irony, too, and he had a point, because at that point both of us had dug our philosophical heels in to the point where we were making more and more outlandish claims, I was just as guilty of it as him, but I was overwhelmed by the preposterousness of two men screaming half-remembered Philosophy 101 at each other, and I laughed so hard I literally fell out of the booth and that pretty much killed the debate. The issue at hand, therefore, remained unresolved, but I still believe this: whether or not any single person’s vote has mathematical impact on an election is kind of irrelevant; the only way for elections to work is for everyone to BELIEVE their individual vote matters, and then go ahead and vote.

Having said that, though, I totally understand why a person would skip going to the polling place (especially in an off-year election) if they thought their vote would have no mathematical impact. When the media publicizes that one candidate has a double-digit poll lead over the other, it inevitably is going to keep people home in droves. And that infuriates me. Did I mention that seems to be the situation in Virginia this Election Day? I am expecting record-low turnout and a validation of the polls’ self-fulfilling prophecies and plenty of opportunities for windbags to mangle the quote about getting the government we deserve. I’m also going to vote.