Call.

Yes, things have been quiet recently, but things have been pretty speedy for the past couple of weeks. The traditional Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” might lack the visceral, from-the-guy impact of traditional American curses like “We’re going to nuke you until you glow then shoot you in the dark,” or “Fuck you,” but is far more accurate as curses go.

A week and a half ago, I was gearing up to get a promotion at work, to the point of buying new clothes and getting my much-beloved ponytail cut back to a reasonable length to look the part. I was pricing new 52-inch 1080p LCD televisions and hi-def TiVos to buy with my soon-to-be new wealth when my boss called and said that there might be a minor snag in my ascension. I took this to mean that someone up top had decided to use caution before transferring power to a man who tries to distract people from the fact that he stinks of old whiskey by loudly moaning about the depths of his hangover. Management took it to mean that we were two days out from massive layoffs. I knew I should have stayed sober in college accounting 101.

Fear not; I survived. The next day a company-wide meeting was scheduled, which more than one of my fellow survivors nervously referred to in the preceding hours as “group therapy,” so clearly they had never been through a layoff before. Those of us who have know that no mere meeting can overcome the guilty feeling of weak schadenfreude that those who come out the other side of a layoff feel. After all, people – friends of yours – have just had their livelihood stripped from them, often through no fault or action of their own… but you can’t escape the giddy feeling of, “Hey, at least it ain’t me!” which forces you to face the fact that, faced with Room 101, you not only would betray Julia, but might actually hunt for rats and ask Big Brother what orifice is most likely to make him come.

In the aftermath of a situation like that, most responsible companies feel the need to have a meeting to rally the troops, salve their emotional wounds and convince them that there’s still plenty of work to be done, if only because if things are bad enough to whack a double-digit percentage of their workforce, they sure as hell can’t afford the bandwidth of a hundred people updating their resumes on Monster.com. That said, most companies don’t use that meeting to announce an across-the-board ten percent pay cut, which is like having a doctor treat your phantom limb disorder by stun-gunning your taint.

So after informing my girl that massive televisions were now far in the future and that we would probably be unable to upgrade to an ocean-facing room at Nerd Prom next year, I called my dad to bemoan my fate… and promptly won the Under bet between me and my girl when it only took him three and a half minutes to blame my misfortune on the Democrats.

Now, I don’t begrudge my dad his political views; he’s retired, and if he wants to spend all day alternating between watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh, well, that’s his lookout. And as a rock-ribbed Independent voter, I generally vocally agree with his views when I do, and humor him when I don’t, but… this time I just clamped my mouth shut before I said something I’d regret. He’s my father, and he raised me and put me through college, but after eight years of his boy in charge, blaming the economic meltdown I’ve been caught up in on Democrats is no better than blaming those hoity-toity, cockteasing Chinese girls for the Rape of Nanking.

It’s just another horrible example of politics as team sport: my dad’s picked his boys, and therefore the other team is evil. Which makes a certain amount of sense; after all, we are from Boston, which mean that we are Red Sox fans, and that we believe that the New York Yankees are the enemy, period. Which is a fine attitude to take when we’re talking about a simple baseball game, but… if the Red Sox announced that if they won the World Series they would raise the cost of bleacher seats to $300 bucks while giving away the luxury boxes to the corporate sponsors for gratis, all while charging a fifty-dollar franchise fee on Red Sox caps to pay for the change, well… I might check the box scores to see how Jeter was hitting.

The ugly fact of the matter is that this country is wallowing in shit. The economy is in the tank, and the government’s running a deficit that makes FDR and Kenneth Lay look like Ebenezer Scrooge. We’re fighting a two-front war, which always works out; just ask Germany. We’re eavesdropping on American citizens and clapping people into irons without benefit of habeas corpus in volumes so impressive it would make J. Edgar Hoover soak the front of his kicky black cocktail number in embarrassed ecstasy. And most tragically, I can’t afford a big screen TV to show off my fucking Blu-Ray player.

We are fucked, and we need someone who can fix it. And I don’t know who that is (Although I clearly have my opinions), but if you’re making your choice based on team loyalty? Well, let’s just say that it felt great when the Red Sox won it all in 2004, it didn’t change my life by one iota; all I got out of it was a picture with the Championship Trophy, which is more than most people got… which was nothing but – surprise! – a fucking price increase for grandstand tickets.

If you’re choosing your guy based on what some millionaire talking-head’s telling you, well… let’s just say if Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olbermann told me that I was an idiot for my choice in my girl, my comic books or my brand of cigarettes, my reaction would run a gamut from laughing to punching him in the head. Why would I let them tell me who to vote for?

If you’re choosing based on what you’re afraid the other guy will do, let’s face reality: Barack Obama is no more a Trojan Horse for socialist terrorism than John McCain is ready to add the Vietnamese to the Guantanamo watchlist so he can get himself some sweet, sweet payback. Both of these guys will do absolutely anything to get elected, and for good or ill, that includes making you scared of the other guy. It’s part of the game, just like those wuss French soccer players who hit the deck and clutch their knees whenever the guy with the ball gets within ten yards of them; it’s a pathetic, sickening display that makes you not want to watch the game, but it’s part of how they play… and why baseball and football are our games.

If you’re planning your vote based on any of those reasons, you are part of the problem, and you should stay the fuck home. Otherwise, do me a favor: go to the polls, forget everything anyone’s told you about either candidate, including me… and ask yourself: who do I think is most likely to fix this everfucking mess? Then hold your nose and vote for that guy.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Because if we fail and choose poorly, you know what it will mean: that I will never be able to watch Iron Man in full 1080 progressive scan.

[tags]Presidential Election, election day, Barack Obama, John McCain, political humor, dark humor, satire[/tags]