One of the unfortunate consequences of living in the Fifty-first State of America is that we have to suffer the ball-grinding tedium that goes along with -not one but two!- general election campaigns. As well as watching the snivelling antics of our own bunch of cretins, we also have to suffer prolonged and in-depth coverage of the motherland’s election. If a US presidential wannabe farts. Britain needs to be told the flavour!
In a way I can see the logic of this. After all, whatever muppet the US electorate puts into The Whitehouse effectively becomes arbitrer of British foreign policy for the next four years. But - quite apart from the boredom of watching endless discussions and analyses of every utterance by candidates so insincere and false, they make Liberace look like a 'regular geezer' -we have to cope with the actual American electorate themselves.
Now I’m sure that individually there are some very nice down-to-earth Americans, imbued with a healthy dose of reality and cynicism but -what the hell happens to them when they come together in a crowd?
Some grinning automaton in a suit only has to utter the words 'Free-damn', 'Dee-macracy' or 'Merkin' and the cunts are a-whoopin' and a-hollerin', or a-wailin' and a-cryin' like they’re present at the second fucking coming - rather than watching some lying tosser, who’d promise them the moon on a stick and sell them his own grandmother, to get his arse on the throne. Watching this actually makes me feel slightly nauseous. Sometimes a wee bit of sick comes up into the back of my throat, before I can get to the remote control and switch channels.
This vomit-inducing spectacle is inflicted upon us once every four years and usually seems to run for about a year itself. But 2008 has been worse than I can ever remember. It seems like the BBC [and to only a slightly lesser extent, the commercial channels] have spent most of this year already, providing 'yawn-by-yawn', in-depth coverage of - not the build-up to the US election itself, but the 'build-up to the build-up', in the form of the interminable selection process whereby the Democratic Party kept the entire nation on the edge of their pillows as they thrashed out the question of whether to choose the first Black 'Slightly Different Shade of Orange' candidate ever, or the person with the biggest balls in the Bill Clinton household.
[Meanwhile coverage of the Republican Party has [thankfully] been limited to the occasional mention in passing of the other dullard’s age, which seems to increase with every bulletin. I think he was 934 last time I heard].
And so finally, last night, the 'Slightly Different Shade of Orange' bloke officially landed the 'Democratic candidate' gig.
For a split second, following the 'Obama-lama-ding-dong love-in' [which needless to say was broadcast live by the BBC] and then this morning’s inevitable tortuous dissection of it, I almost felt a great weight of ennui lift from my eyelids - until it suddenly struck me that the 'Race for the Whitehouse' [Remember it’s a 'Snore-a-Thon' not a 'Sprint'! ] hasnae even started yet. The endless miles of comment and opinion spewed out by the British media over what seems like the entire year so far are only the introduction to the US election campaign itself. There are months and months and months of this shite, still to come!
At a time like this I try and draw comfort from the words of Winston Churchill, when faced with a similarly soul destroying and seemingly interminable future:
"This is not The End. It is not even The Beginning of the End. But it is The end of the Beginning!"
