According to pundits and those “in the know,” political parties will soon be campaigning for your vote every day of every year, even when there is no election in the immediate future.
This is a result of the growing Americanization of our election process. Our neighbours to the south have developed a system that forces a constant wearying sloganeering and empty rhetoric from politicos of all stripes. After
all, if one party does it, the other is forced into doing the same, if only to keep from vanishing in the voter’s consciousness. Hand in hand with the speechifying is the ratcheting up of the fundraising machine, which will be in overdrive 365 days a year.
And here’s the thing, none of the clowns hoping to get your vote will actually say anything meaningful.
Nope, nada. Their words will be carefully crafted to sound as though they mean something when all they are actually meant to do is to manipulate your vote.
A whole fleet of marketing geniuses brilliant at selling you everything from peanut butter to cars will be engaged to find just the right buttons to push.
There will be no more candid speeches or off the cuff remarks. The “big guys” will avoid anything approaching real public settings where any of the unwashed might ask a question for which they don’t have a carefully crafted answer. Journalists are identified as “friendly” or not. “Friendly” journalists get to ask questions, journalists who are not are simply avoided like the plague.
Our current government is practicing hard to win the media game. Mr.Harper rarely takes questions from the media and when he does they are few and often limited to bozo journalists guaranteed to ask stupid questions like....”gee, how did you like your trip to Inuvik” variety, or the star-worshipping kind who gush about his blue sweater or penchant for cats.
In order to try to sneak in a meaningful question, journalists have taken to agreeing amongst themselves who will ask which question in the hope that something more meaningful can be pried from the lips of our Styrofoam politicos but more often than not, the simpleton in the crowd will still be the one hand picked to ask the vapid question of the day.
I won’t even start to talk about “talking points,” those scripted answers that the current robots we elected spout whenever a question is raised. In my books it’s all about half-truths, evasions and sometimes even downright lies all sugar coated to sound reassuring and positive.
Because we, the electorate, are just so damned easy.
So, here’s my remedy. When the 2015 election rolls around, don’t take it lying down. Get off your couch and find a polling booth and vote for whichever platform is meaningful to you. If you don’t like any of them, too darned bad. vote for the least repugnant, but vote. Get a weird phone call dissing another party? Vote for the party that’s been slandered, that will put paid to someone’s robocall effort. Get a phone call directing you to a phantom polling booth in Timbuktoo, Ontario? Report it to Elections Canada and then grit your teeth and drive to the right polling booth and vote.
If we leave it up to the few fanatics to run our democracy then we deserve the government we get.