New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer (19 page)

Electile Dysfunction

 

NEW RULE

 

P
olitical conventions are important, and therefore they deserve to be broadcast and viewed in their entirety. You can’t call everyone in Washington morons if you don’t know exactly what it is that makes them morons.

The conventional wisdom about conventions is that they’re no longer worthy of our attention because they’re too “produced” and there’s no “drama.” You want drama? Hitch a ride home with Ted Kennedy. We’re picking a president here, not the last comic standing. The media treats these conventions like pointless interruptions of their real job, which seems to be covering LA’s latest celebrity murder trial. No surprises, no excitement. Hey, you know what’s exciting? It’s exciting when politicians get drunk with power because people aren’t keeping an eye on them. No one expected we’d retaliate for 9/11 by attacking ... Iraq! Whoo, unpredictable, exciting!

And the reason the conventions are so “produced” is because if they weren’t, the networks wouldn’t air them at all. To me, the sight of John Kerry rushing through his 2004 acceptance speech in a cold sweat so that he wouldn’t go overtime and force viewers to miss the first 2 minutes of
Elimidate
was one of the saddest moments in the history of democracy. The man is laying out his plan for ruling the globe, and we’re treating him like it’s audition night at the Improv and he just got the light.

I’m not saying everyone has to pore over issues and read everything that’s out there—we can’t even get our president to do that. But the conventions are one of the only times when the election isn’t reduced to sound bites and attack ads, when you can get to know these people a little. It’s not exciting enough just to hear Teresa Heinz Kerry? Sorry, next time we’ll get Justin Timberlake to whip out her tit.

Maybe the conventions aren’t boring; maybe it’s the people who don’t participate in their own society who are boring. Once every 4 years, the two parties put on a pageant for you: “These are our faces; these are our voices; this is our vision of America’s future.”You’d think that would be a little more interesting than reruns of
Yes, Dear
.

Hypocratic Growth

 

NEW RULE

 

N
o one has their shit together at age 22.

Yes, like many others, George Bush avoided serving in Vietnam, but the truth is, I don’t really care if our president showed up for all of his National Guard jumping jacks in 1973. We all made mistakes when young and chasing a buzz—Bush blew off his calisthenics, Saddam gassed his own people, I bought the John and Yoko album where they just farted for an hour into a tape recorder.

The phrase “youthful indiscretions” is redundant because how many discreet young people do you know? The people you need to worry about are not the ones who
sowed their
wild oats but the ones who
didn’t.
Michael Jackson had to wait till he was an adult to have a childhood, and I think we all see how well that turned out.

Go back far enough in any great man’s life, and you will eventually get to the stuff he did or said before he was great or even a man. Don King started out life in Cleveland as a corrupt, murderous thug, but then—okay, bad example.

But the point remains: Trying to define a person’s current self by their past self is the worst kind of gotcha. Our mistakes from the past are just that—mistakes, and most of the time it was necessary to make them in order to become the wiser person we then became.
You
never got drunk and pissed yourself? Or sold drugs to schoolchildren? Or panicked when you couldn’t get it up at a bachelor party and killed a hooker?

Yes, if only hindsight could come without having to mess up first. And believe me, I have the platform shoes to prove that one. But to exploit youthful mistakes for political gain is—well, let’s just say, when you get older, you might look back and regret it.