Reporting from the nation’s top show

By Evan Lisull

Curtis James Jackson III seems prima facie to be a typical swing voter. He initially came out in favor of Hilary, citing his approval of her husband’s administration, but later switched over to Sen. Barack Obama. Except of course, that Mr. Jackson is more commonly known by his rap moniker “50 Cent”, and “50” is a convicted felon, and cannot vote. 

I recount this Eight-Mile-infused election tidbit with my colleague, but his mind is elsewhere, a Cheshire cat grin breaking out across his face as his thought processes reached their apex. "Dude, let's watch...the Dude!" I chuckle, and indeed, for it is an ideal hortatory for a haze-filled Tuesday night. The popcorn pops, and, for an all-too-brief moment, things are going well. Life might not be fucked, after all.

Enter John Goodman, in all his corpulence, playing "Walter Sobchak", Vietnam vet. Only it's not Walter; it's John McCain – “Are you sure this is the right movie?” – and as Sir Chipmunk Cheeks himself begins his soliloquy, the planet shifts just slightly, just enough for me to realize that everything has gone wrong. "No, John, you’re not wrong,"-- John?!?-- "you're just an asshole." I calmly get up, smile blithely, walk to a stranger's bathroom, and vomit profusely. I cannot believe this.

These candidates: I look around and everywhere I see them, ghosts haunting the corporeal machine, lighting cigarettes on the stairwell and advertising Coca Cola. Forget niche culture; we've got the Great Vortex. The boundaries have been shattered, politics becoming movies becoming advertisements becoming disposable ink pens.

Once again, politics have ruined my life.

Right now, it is dead season in the Long, Long March to Pennsylvania Ave. (known aptly on the Daily Show as the Clusterfuck to the White House), but news anchors and their caustic blogging cousins are still in high drive, and like PCP users after getting the hit of a lifetime, they are read to fuck anyone up. Thus, anything is and has been fair game, from the candidate's sartorial choices to the length of their toenails to their daughters ("How much? How much for the little girls? How much for your women?"). One daughter, in particular, brings the boys to the yard, and she ain't in the dairy industry. She's Meghan McCain, and she makes the Bush Twins look so 2007. She blogs, she's sassy, she's sexy (this is politics, remember-- anyone thirty or under is automatically "hot"), and her luggage is carried by a Chinaman named Mr. Lee. She establishes her credentials amongst the will o' the wisp known as the "Youth Vote" by listing Vampire Weekend among her favorite artists, and The Big Lebowski among her favorite films.

This led Jonathan Chait of The New Republic to notice:

    A main character in the film is Walter Sobchak, a gruff, lovable, hot-headed, moralistic foreign policy hawk who's often confused about the facts and constantly invokes his experience in Vietnam. I wonder what she thinks when she watches it.

As if this weren't enough, we also had to kill Rocky Balboa, the much-loved boxer who may or may not have had a speech impediment. "Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common," said Sen. Hillary Clinton at a Philadelphia rally in early April, "I never quit. I never give up. And neither do the American people. So when I see Rocky in his warmups, I can't help but see a pantsuit...not really. But will I ever hear the lines, "I had no prime, I had nothin'!" and not consider the implications?

Of course, this is the same "Rocky" played by Sylvester Stallone, the HGH-pumping actor who endorsed Sen. John McCain for the presidency, a man who wants to ban the substance. McCain is also supported by Heidi Montag, who apparently is a "star" on the "hit show" The Hills, featured on MTV, the same network that hosted a debate with Mike Huckabee, who was supported by Chuck Norris, whose legends of powress have clogged the Internet tubes. 

It's like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon on crack, only a lot less fun. 

It would be one thing if this were a one-way, East-bound highway from LA to DC. But increasingly, politics is becoming pop. Already, Washington is known as "Hollywood for ugly people." The chief executive spends three innings shooting the shit about baseball with Joe Morgan. Politicians (or their aides) have their own Facebook and MySpace pages. 

This back-and-forth results a serious intellectual failure: for many, especially those among our generation, politics is merely a stem on the Great VH1-MTV-TMZ Tree of Pop. Political preferences are not based in philosophical consideration, experience, or empirical studies; they are based solely on personal preference. They are "supporters" of political parties and members in so far as we are "supporters" of Law and Order or the Dave Matthews Band. 

Expect only drown-out demise from such a state of affairs. A citizenry that cannot distinguish between entertainment and politics will soon learn that all roads lead to Rome, a Rome where intellectuals mock Emperor Claudius' death on the crapper while the principles of the Republic are flushed away.