My last blog was about the one thing which matters the most. It focused on what is the most important ingredient in life and… heck, if you really want to know what it was about, you might as well read it.
In this one, I will talk about what we need in plenty. As you might have guessed, this is related to the presidential race, and my comments on it.
Comedians always have a special place in the society. Their job is make people laugh. They blur the line between the public and personal parts of anyone’s life, to get the audience to their feet. That’s something to be appreciated and contained. Most of them tend towards the excessive always, to achieve their goal. This leaves a sour taste, and the laughter is purely based on insulting a person’s personal life, in extremely exotic words. I find Craig Ferguson to be almost always overly personal with most of his jokes on politicians. Even with the personal assaults, I don’t find him outstandingly funny. Jon Stewart tends towards the gross, especially when he starts digging deep into a single personality. However, there are times when the comedian brings out a fact, which is humorous by its very definition. It is true and extremely funny purely because unbelievably, it’s real. According to me, this is differentiates the really good ones, from the rest of the crop. The ability to find facts which astonish and humor the audience is appreciable. Bill Maher is one such comedian. He has captured the essence of the race in far fewer words than any of the other comedians. But he has made the point clearer than anyone else. His focus is not just the election, but its impact on the world around. He questions every facet of the world which looks irrational. Be it religion, be it the Wall Street crash, or the most ineligible candidate in the fray, Sarah Palin. His analysis of why she isn’t suitable, and how absurd it is to think of her as the president was just awesome! His jokes reflected reality. And he made me realize how screwed the system has become.
Sarah Palin is the Governor of Alaska. I do not know about her achievements during her term as a governor, but from what I can gather from the news, they are not something to write home about. I do not want this blog to turn into a personal attack on Ms.Palin. Rather, I want to highlight how ineligible candidates can come up and be posed in a democracy. I leave the Palin-bashing to the news websites (except for Fox which thinks otherwise!).
To me, the GOP VP pick looks to be dumbest decision ever by the party. I cannot believe that in today’s age, we have such an incompetent candidate in the fray. From whatever interviews I have seen, I can see that the professional knowledge needed by a vice-presidential candidate are completely absent in her. However, the topic is not the person, but how she managed to grab the ticket.
To find out how she pulled that trick, we have to look quite a long way back. I was watching a Greek movie a month back in Charlotte in which the narrator was boasting about the contributions of Greece to the rest of the world. He attributed quite a few things to Greece, which was quite obvious because he was Greek, and another Greek edited the movie. Before all this sounds too much like Greek and Latin, let me tell you why I brought this up here. He mentioned that democracy took its birth in Greece, and the world has to thank Greece for that. Really?
The question I ask is not about whether Greece introduced the world to democracy (that’s for a later blog), but should we really thank Greece for democracy? Lets see how democracy works. Everyone (dumb or not) votes for their choice and the candidate with the maximum number of votes wins the election. This looks like a very fair way of managing large populations, as the candidates are responsible for their constituencies. But there is an underlying assumption here, which is that every voter is smart enough to know who to vote for. I think this is the fallacy which has helped so many incompetent leaders to make it to the top, and remain there. It’s in the interest of the leader to continue to maintain the population at their current level of dumbness, hence ensuring that they don’t make the smart decisions when they vote. And this is cycle. In India, my home country, this is the single biggest reason for the lack of development in sub-urban and rural constituencies. This is a fallacy conveniently hidden from the public, because every party has a vested interest in maintaining status quo. Now, the weave is almost done. It is to target these voters that Ms.Palin has been brought into the fray.
The initial surge in popularity was purely due to the “wonder” factor. Most of the smart ones realized soon after that Ms.Palin wouldn’t qualify as an educated voter, let alone as a vice-presidential nominee. I find it extremely shocking that even with her on the ticket, the race is as close as it is now. I think it is the biggest example in modern times that the second most powerful person in the world throws books out of a library, and has absolutely no idea what her job is. It is a mockery of the system that such a candidate is contesting in the most powerful country in the world.
The interesting thing is that this country is home to the smartest people in the world. This country attracts the best brains in the world, and retains them. It is continually the one super-power which leads the world in every field. However, the fact that there are more people like Ms.Palin than Mr.Maher only suggests that democracy isn’t something which can be applied in its truest form.
I really wish the Greeks thought it through before they imposed democracy on us.
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