I used to love a good debate night. When I worked at The Daily Show, it meant getting home in the early morning hours, still buzzing with the adrenaline of pulling off a live show. And “pulling it off” really just meant watching hours of CNN or Fox or MSNBC with your friends who also happened to be your coworkers, making each other laugh, then getting to see your dumb jokes filtered through the mind and mouth of someone much smarter and more charismatic than yourself, beamed into the living rooms of millions of people — or more likely, onto the laptops of millions of people lying in bed because that’s how the youth watches television these days. Even if the content of a debate made you feel desperate about the future, there were people with whom you could commiserate and a platform from which to decry the stupidity that evoked your desperation. Also, there were so many snacks, so many fun-sized Snickers, so much sugar cereal. When I look back on my former life, it might be the cereal I miss most of all…
I still watch debates with the zeal of someone who writes for a topical comedy show, even though it has been years since I did this work. I watched debates in this way long before I did this work. It’s not that I’ve ever been a particularly savvy political scholar, I’m just incredibly emotionally gullible (it’s why my feelings are always so hurt!). I love lapping up a politician’s bullshit. I love all the poetic waxing on our national values, I love going high when they go low, I love believing we’re the lofty, principled country we declared ourselves to be at our independence, rather than the small-minded narcissists we act like in the day-to-day. But last night, be it from true baseness or dementia, neither presidential candidate was trying to appeal to the better angels of our nature. They were arguing about their golf handicaps, and over who was the worst president in history, and over who said what first and who was copying whom. And it’s not that I hate old people. I fucking love old people! But I love them for their wisdom — something that, last night, was curiously absent. Instead, a barely animated corpse and a petulant ghost were slapping their limp gray dicks on their respective podiums in a grotesque display of geriatric masculinity. Not only did it offend me, it hurt my feelings.
I grew up thinking it was important to participate in the democratic process. I remember my dad taking me to vote at the church near our house, right across from the parking lot where I learned to ride a bike and a block away from where my best friend once choked on a Dorito and I ran to get her parents because we were both pretty sure she wasn’t gonna make it. It was thrilling to slip behind those musty curtains, to pull the levers, to feel ownership over — or at least membership in — my community. And who cares if I was committing voter fraud by voting on my father’s behalf? I was young wild and free. I had so much respect for the system, I was willing to give it the middle finger just to take part in it.
At ten, I remember discussing the Clinton/Bush Sr. debates from the evening before with my classmates at the fancy private school I attended — some of whom I’m pretty sure were distant Bush cousins? The Bushes must have cousins at every “[insert pretentious name] Country Day School” in America, right? Anyhoo, one little girl giggled, “Mr. Bush was funny when—” I blacked out immediately so I couldn’t tell you what Mr. Bush could have possibly said that was funny, maybe something about how his wife was always going around putting miscarried fetuses in jars and showing them to her not-miscarried children? But as I listened to my classmate, I remember thinking, does this fucking idiot honestly support Bush over Clinton? Nevermind that the reason she supported Bush was the same reason I supported Clinton: because our parents told us to. I couldn’t yet think for myself, but I sensed that there was a right candidate to pick and a wrong one, and since this bitch’s parents belonged to The Country Club (see last week’s newsletter) I was going to defer to mine.
The first election in which I could vote (legally) was a little Bush V Gore presidential race, the precursor to the more widely known Bush V Gore Supreme Court ruling. Anyone else still get a chill down their spine when they hear the words “hanging chad”? I was a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College (go fighting Sex Cults) and since I still couldn’t think for myself, I voted for Ralph Nader. I was shocked and devastated when he didn’t win, given that he’d cornered 95% of the vote on campus. In 2004, now a senior at Yale — having swapped out my radically liberal bubble for a moderately liberal one — I drank so much on election night that I woke up the next morning thinking Kerry still had a shot. I stumbled into my 9am Modern Poetry lecture in my pajamas, brimming with hope, until our professor had us read Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” aloud and I started picking up on some seriously downtrodden vibes from the room. (The current candidates might do well to revisit “Sailing to Byzantium”. An aged man is but a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick!) Still, more than Kerry’s loss, I remember being appalled by a classmate’s confession that she didn’t vote because all the absentee ballot red tape seemed like too much of a pain to deal with. This classmate, a political science major and pathological over-achiever, embodied the kind of cynicism I was still naive enough to be offended by. It wasn’t enough to present as a model citizen. You had to be one when no one was watching. You had to do it because no one was watching.
Last night I prepared for the debate with my usual enthusiasm. I made a martini. I explained to my four-year-old what a debate was and why this one was going to be particularly unusual. He was surprisingly curious about the body politic for a four-year-old, and I realized suddenly that I was about to start molding this little boy’s beliefs, I was going to be the one thinking for him while he was still too young to think for himself. I tried to present my views clearly but dispassionately, because I really hate it when you hear little kids parroting their parents’ stridency. I tried to explain that even when the candidates are uninspired, the process still is! Then he got bored of listening to me and went out to swim with his brother and father while I watched alone inside. Was it the absence of my old Daily Show coworkers that made me feel so lonely as two old men blubbered incoherently for an hour and half? I don’t think so. Rather, I felt lonely because no one I was watching on TV seemed to give a shit.
I get that Biden is tired. He’s been in politics since the Earth was primordial soup. And I get that Trump is shameless (seemingly in service of not letting anyone shame him, a psychological irony if ever there was one!). I’m not sure why Jake Tapper and Dana Bash decided to do the Mannequin Challenge for an hour and a half on live TV, but political pundits move in mysterious ways. I understand that it was inevitable that I walk away from last night’s debate disappointed. And yet, here I am, disappointed, and taking it personally. Because someone needs to care about this process, this country, more than their own ego. It’s not enough to present as someone who cares about democracy. You have to do it even when it means admitting you’re not the best person to protect it. You have to do it because you’re not the best person to protect it. Then you have to bust your 81-year-old ass to help find the person who is. If you don’t, the cynics have won, because you’ve become one of them.
Totally funnily right on!