Thank the Lord, Election Day is almost here and the unending stream of broadcast, snail mailed, emailed and texted versions of I’m-the-best-candidate-for-anything-and-everything-in-your-insignificant-lives political messages will be finished; for about a week, anyway, until the new stream of aforementioned begins for the next elections a year or two away. Think about the poor mail carriers out there delivering the printed stuff, knowing in their hearts that homeowners will take this stuff from their mailboxes and directly deposit it in their recycle bins, leaving the mail person to wonder, Why did I bother schlepping this all over the neighborhood?
This widely-distributed glut of political propaganda is necessary, though, to help us voters decide which candidates are the redeeming angels on the ticket and which are the spawn of Satan. It’s generally pretty easy to distinguish between the two because the angels are shown in beautiful, four-color versions, while the spawns appear in depressing grays and blacks most likely with red eyes and parts of gnawed babies dangling out of their craggy lips. Then, however, the next ad message that shows up will have the same candidates only with the images reversed.
The people who create these political ads know that the average voter has the attention span of a flashbulb and the I.Q. of a bedpan and won’t bother to read the worded message, so the differing visuals are a necessity: color, good; black and white, bad.
A large portion of this abbreviated attention span can be blamed on our smart phone addiction because a person can flip between screens if something boring or stupid appears, such as a political ad or a pitch for Lumi® Deodorant. The only thing currently known to stop this endless screen flipping is one that pops up with naked bodies. So politicians take note: It doesn’t matter if your image is full color or black and white as long as it contains prurient images. This holds true for printed materials as well as electronic, as long as there’s a warning for children under 18 to not look at the lascivious images that follow, which is exactly what they’ll do to figure out why they’re not supposed to look at them. I’ve lost track of the number of complaints I’ve heard from parents who’ve told me their child had political postcards of Newt Gingrich nude, except for black garter belts, tacked up on their bulletin boards. In spite of the aforementioned (I believe I aforementioned “aforementioned” a couple of paragraphs up), a large number of young people seriously intend to go to college. To be truthful, the only things young people seriously think about are the latest Bad Bunny song and those who they’re attracted to.
Let’s not overlook the communist equation. Our illustrious (or illiterate) president has dug up the old Joe McCarthy playbook and claims the commies are everywhere, especially in Texas where they’re on TikTok and Facebook inviting all Texans with gun racks in the rear windows of their pickup trucks to barbecues in an effort to indoctrinate them. Once those geniuses are converted, the commies will move east from state to state across the south, starting with the one that’s next to Texas (whatever that one is) and then head north to states in that part of the country, such as the states of Tennessee, Ohio, Emergency, Pennsylvania, and Existence.
But I digress, mainly because I forgot why I began this piece in the first place. Oh. It was to remind you all to vote and floss daily. I don’t mean vote daily, just floss. I should have inserted a comma after “vote” to avoid the confusion. Sorry!