Phew. Its now 96 hours past the midterm elections here in the United States, and I’m beginning to clear the debris from off my windshield.
I’ve been in a heightened state of awareness this last month in anticipation of the midterms, watching the political blogs and keeping an eye on the Yahoo! front page, which displays the news roundup from the Associated Press — its a good way to see how the right-wing propaganda machine is holding up.
As far as I know, it held up pretty well.
For whatever reason — most usually because of perennial lack of interest in voting during non-Presidential year elections — 40 million Democrats stayed home. The machine held up pretty well in keeping the noise bubble at a deafening roar about the President’s birth certificate, his purported Muslim roots, the feared imposition of Sharia Law on America, and more recently a false report about a $200 million dollar price tag on the President’s upcoming and important two-day summit trip to India to discuss the US role in the global economy.
The machine held up pretty well in keeping old, Southern, blue collar, straight white males hopping mad and anxious to vote to elect the people who will ultimately halve their Medicare, slash their Social Security or dole it out to Wall Street to speculate with. The machine was efficient in keeping us ungrounded, unfocused and therefore terrified, embracing the dark side of ourselves with our guns, racism, homophobia, twitter tweets and Facebook pages joking about assassinating the President, the Speaker of the House and other Democratic politicians.