Preheat environment to global heating specifications. Take a bitterly split America. Smear with layers of rich, premium, Citizens United (TM) dough. Add an overabundance of cracked, mixed nuts (right side only). Beat incessantly for 3.9 years, or until population is completely frothy.
Next, fold in sprayable, fully buttered-up and money-sweetened manure. Turn heat up under mixture via lack of media controls. Poke at constantly with sharp stick until entire mass is boiling and seething. Using no intelligent guidance whatsoever, serve with seasonal sides: Delusional Greed Cakes (Republicans), Repetitive Dismay Bars (Independents and Greens), and Wishful Thinking Cookies (Democrats).
(For extra texture, add Surprise Blowout Frosting, available from Hurricane Whimsies by Sandy -- now with boutique locations from the Bahamas and up into Canada.)
Caution: Filling will be steamy and lethal. Let cool for remainder of current archeological / geological cycle before attempting to extract poisons for safe review by future generations.
Note: If it isn't, it should be against the law to serve to children under 18, and anyone wearing an "American Hopes and Dreams" medic-alert badge from The Founder's Constitution Appreciation Society -- or anyone else bearing enough awareness, intelligence, and spine to refuse service from the Free All Day and All Night, All You Can Eat and/or Take Buffet.
For more Vote America! recipe cards, please send SASE, to: How Much Patience and Money Do You Have Institute, P.O. Box 11111, Eleventy, MO 24680. Please include a note stating how you heard of us, and a short essay on the subject of why it is, exactly, you think the current election system and campaign system is state-of-the-art and world class in every way.
Please include your mandatory donation of blood, sweat, tears, and DNA sample, should we need to clone perfectly content, incurious voters for subsequent elections. (Please use a sealed, triple-lined, Post Office approved mailing container for bio-hazardous materials.)
* * * * *
The calm of a far shore has never seemed further away in brain cells, nor farther away in continental or nautical miles. It has been a rough ride toward this election, and the final week shows no signs of letting anyone up off the mat.
Of course, it does not help that we look toward teevee pundits and what passes anymore for news people, to divine the status quo of the moment.
Television is far too big a business to back away when money is still on the table. It's in their best interests to keep ratcheting up the tension of the close race -- as they call it and see it -- so waves of breathless viewers keep tuning in, and help keep ad rates soaring.
When your main messenger has the highest possible motivation to keep stringing you along for as long as possible, keeping you on a super-taut junkie's wire, perched helplessly by mere friction on the thinnest edge of your chair, you know you have a whopper of a problem.
Whoppers of all kinds, of course, are no stranger to American elections, but it is rare when so many convene at once.
There have been the outrageous tides of Romney and Ryan lies, pre-set years ago on maximum auto-spew, a virtually uncorked volcano of molten mash-ups of prevarications, falsehoods, and complete fabrications.
There's the unendingly deep pockets for negative carpet-bombing ads, courtesy of the Supreme Court.
There are the inflamed waves of psychotropic ignorance people sport proudly and applaud, not knowing it to be propaganda implanted by right-wingnut media buffoons, deep into their consumers' cores -- with the originators maintaining vast fame for the sort of entertainment that cruel, self-centered children usually take from yanking the wings off captive flies.
There's the porous sieve of the election process itself, a laughable jerry-built system of erratic, hackable, ultimately unknowable voting machines controlled by private corporations. There's the lack of a paper trail and voter receipts.
There's the manipulated, massaged, spin and twirl of Republican voter suppression and intimidation efforts, and the guessing game forced by Republican officeholders, who, at the last minute, shoved requirements into place for special ID cards as mandatory. Or not. Or who knows.
Name your favorite farce: Poll watchers whose main mission is intimidation, justified under various Halloween disguises and guises. Billboards in poor neighborhoods reminding residents of their heinous consequences of felonious voting crimes. The witch-hunts for voter fraud, when election fraud lay exposed and untouched by prosecutors in almost every state. The deceptions taught to poll workers for their enforcement...
Every possible dirty trick and sleight of hand is in force and in full GOP swing, capping only the stunning lack of solid information from a pair of goofball challengers, a drone and whine combined with the squeal and sucking sounds of the suckers lapping it up wholesale.
It's enough to make almost any optimist believe human beings have absolutely no ability to govern themselves -- nor should they have the right, if the world were a place where fairness was dished out like dirty waters in the midst of a raging flood.
Then, for the sheer hell of it, stuff a monster, pre-Halloween storm into the works, and see if the whole thing blows apart or implodes. (Add another week to Sandy's timing, and we'd all be shimmied up a constitutional tree, watching the roaring current washing through below, wondering what to do.)
Then, of course, other pundits focus their last-salvo guns on the possibilities of an electoral tie or a lop-sided vote flopped atop us, in which the popular votes marches one way, but the electoral win slides along in the other.
What a process. Try to explain to a Martian -- or, better yet, to someone from another country, while justifying it. Meanwhile, all along the Atlantic coast there are some failed, knocked-out, or capsized sewer treatment plants adding nasty effluent to floodwaters.
Combine all this with the even-nastier affluence of billionaires who increasingly tip and toy with the level board -- those level playing fields -- in their labyrinthine ways, and it goes quite a long way to explaining that foul taste in the backs of our mouths and throats.
Every four years we wake up with a migraine, blurry vision, and a wallpaper-curling case of morning mouth.
* * * * *
Antidote Recipes: Hold your loved ones close, and find reasons to laugh until your stomach hurts and you cannot breathe. Remember what is truly important in your life, then hold onto it like it's the last time you will ever see it -- because one day, it will be.
- Become involved, make a difference, ensure your representatives get an earful of your disappointments, and get an eyeful of what you want to see happen -- hold their feet to the fire, as they always ask, and make them act in your interests.
- Look, learn, then lay it on firm: Tired of lies? Insist on the truth. Call out lies as lies -- not fibs, slips, or malfunctioning lips.
- Stop being impressed with empty suits and torrents of rampaging verbiage that say nothing: demand that your questions be met with actual answers, or shout empty suits out of the way.
- Push to find ways to get corporate money all the way out of politics, and instead funded by government or by a controlled, overseen pot of donations.
- Other countries have found ways to not put their people through the wringer, and to centrally fund candidates, getting them out from behind teevee cameras, and into face-to-face meetings with voters.
- You saying it'd never happen, we couldn't match that? Then, what you're saying is we're not number one, and we have no chance to ever be great again, or even catch up.
- Limit the time campaigns can run, force candidates into real meetings with real people instead of allowing them to hide behind teevee commercials and ranks of advisors and marketers.
- Lead a local or regional battle to get hate speech, racism, and sexism scrubbed from the airwaves under the cover of entertainment: the airwaves belong to the people, despite the current appearance of corporate purchase and permanent putrefaction.
You can get used to living in an open sewer, you can move away, or you can clean it up. We have to do what every single generation did before us: Show up, bring a shovel, and work together -- or else.
Of course, you can always spend the rest of your life telling yourself you're perfectly happy with what anyone else feels like giving you -- or taking back from you. Either way, it'll be a lot of work, no doubt about that.
You can put that energy toward making and putting things right, or you can use it to make plausible-sounding excuses for yourself, and for your children, when they ask. Either way, you've already got skin in this game -- like it or not.
As for recipes: We change it -- or Behemoth Billionaire Bakeries can crank out enough humble pie to jam down our throats for the next ten thousand years. We're either ready to keep swallowing, real hard -- or we're ready for something else.
Fretting ties: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/10/31/163950264/presidential-race-what-if-there-are-two-winners
Fretting contingencies: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/30/how-many-more-near-election-disasters-before-congress-wakes-up.html