Voting for the President? Best not to think about it.

In just a few hours, Americans – possibly as many as eight or nine of them – will be going to the polls to elect a new President. Much hangs in the balance. As the political divide in the United States has widened, the choice of either Obama or Romney will mean a very different world in a variety of ways in the years to come. Global warming and climate change, the management of an economy in tatters, America’s response to conflict abroad and the rise of the Chinese dragon, all these hugely important matters will be dealt with so very differently by these two men. And so the question I would like to ask is this: how much thought will the voters who bother to turn out give to their decision? And the answer I would like to offer is this: stuff all.

It’s rather harsh when put so baldly, so let me substantiate my baldness. Following the sudden interposition of Hurricane Sandy into the into the presidential race, much speculation followed as to the effect it would have on the swing voters yet to choose their favoured candidate. Would it encourage them to vote for Obama, or would they turn against him and give their vote to Romney? According to a political scientist (who shall have to remain anonymous because I can’t remember her name, but trust me, I’m not making this up – I’ll tell you when I’m making it up), history suggests that when natural disaster strikes, people blame whoever’s in office. That’s right. Earthquake? Blame the President. Hurricane? Clearly the President’s fault. Heat-wave? The President again. Cool winds with a  slight chance of rain? You get the idea. So, without going into the reasonableness of attributing to the President powers of changing the weather or moving the earth, the basic point is that, if something bad happens just before an election, it’s not normally good for the incumbent. Why? Because people look out the window at the rain falling and think, ‘Useless bloody President’.

Now, the fact is that, like most democracies, in America most voters already know who they’re voting for. They don’t need to think about it at all because if you’re a Democrat, you’ll vote Democrat even if your guy is waxing lyrical about the virtues of rounding up all short people and putting them into gulags, while if you’re a Republican, you’ll behave similarly with respect to your man, even if he is suggesting that raising taxes and increasing welfare spending is a good idea (actually, in that case, it might not be true, but again, you get the idea). This means that something like 80% of voters (and here I am making the numbers up, but I reckon they’re about right) don’t have to think about their choice – they just vote (or don’t vote, as the case is with most of them). This leaves 20% who haven’t decided, but will apparently decide solely on the basis of the following methodology:  Step 1 – did a bad thing happen before the election? Yes? Vote the new guy in. No? Vote for the incumbent. Step 2 – if a bad thing didn’t happen, choose some equally banal reason for making your choice. The fact that the outcome will have a profound effect on the country and indeed the planet is no reason to give it any more thought than that.

That suggests, of course, that I think Romney will steal it (I mean that figuratively, obviously - no one would steal the American presidency...). But I don't. I think Barack will still win. Why? Because there is, in fact, a third possible step in the voting thought process: Step 1(a) did a bad thing happen but the President's done a swell job of sorting it out? Yes, vote the incumbent. And that's what I think will happen. 

Irrational? Of course it is, but then that’s  people for you. And lest anyone think I’m picking unfairly on Americans, let me assure you all of this stands for voters in any country (and for my views on irrationality, see my column 'Whoever said we were rational?' in which I describe my irrational love for my desk).

The gift that is Kim Dotcom

His face is that of a cherub, yet more cherubic than any of the cherubim ever beholden by the prophet Ezekiel (he who sat minding his own business on the banks of the River Kebar before being rudely disturbed by visions of God and cherubim). This is perhaps not such a remarkable fact itself: the cherubim Ezekiel saw had four faces, four wings, and the kind of feet that would look more appropriate on a cow, while he who is our concern here has a face upon which one cannot look without a silent tear rolling down the cheek. Looking upon his countenance, we are overcome by the knowledge we are in the presence of innocence most holy. For such is the face of Kim Dotcom and now that he is come among us, we must gird our collective loins and fight with what strength we can muster, down to the last feeble thrust of the pike and the desperate parry of the sword, to keep him upon our shores. When fate once brings you the rarest of jewels, it is a dullard who would trade that jewel for the world, or even for favourable terms of trade with the world’s most powerful economy. The jewel is without compare; no price can we place upon it, for its value is infinite and its beauty is boundless. Such is the man we know as Kim Dotcom.

When once we have walked long enough upon this earth, it will come to us that one moment more than any other defines our brief transit here among the living. Some remember where they were when man first walked upon the moon, others when the angelic Kennedy was taken from us, while yet for others that defining moment is when Philip ‘Phil’ Taylor won his record-breaking 15^th world darts championship (o rapturous day!). For me that singular moment occurred when first I heard the name of Kim Dotcom uttered upon the air-waves. It flew like a magical chariot upon the ether and came to me down the wires. I knew not what had happened, but that for one moment the time was out of joint. I felt the strength go from my legs. My mind swam and my vision blurred. Nothing would ever be the same again. This alone I knew to be a solemn truth and in reverence did I bow my head.

But let us examine more closely the gift Mr Dotcom brings. It is, above all, the gift of colour, of light, of contrast, that Mr Dotcom offers us. We have lived too long in cold shadows. We have suffered too long the dull, grey, dreary figures who tiresomely perambulate through our newspapers and tediously hold forth on our televisions. Like the Israelites we have wandered too long in a wilderness bereft of signs of life, the only sound the echoes of our own cries. We have been subjected to an interminable parade of the all too desperately finite, the chosen few who have numbered themselves among the elect and then been presented to us for our delectation, when in reality each repeated exposure is like being poisoned slowly, drop by single drop of bitter arsenic. Among them like a colossus has he come, a prophet to revive our wearied souls, to raise us from our spiritual anomie, to give us succour in our time of direst need.

And so we are intrigued, beguiled. At once are we fascinated and revolted. His is indeed the face of innocence, but in his breast what nefariousness lurks? His smile promises sweetness, but in his eyes, what madness can be seen? This is the gift he brings, the gift of strangeness, of madness, of ambiguity and multiplicity. He is many and he is one.

Just recently, we have heard the lamentations of Mr Dotcom, weeping like the prophet Jeremiah, sighing unto his breast at having been forsaken. For this week did he speak of the treachery he has suffered at the hands of one of those dreary little figures who populate the monotonous dreamscape of our political world. Like Peter denying Christ (vide. Matt. 26:33-35), so too did John Banks deny Kim Dotcom. ‘I don’t know him,’ said Peter, and thus did John Banks also murmur with the stabs of betrayal in his heart. Perhaps somewhere in Parliament a cock crew, I cannot say for sure, but then did Mr Dotcom know what it is to be without a friend (I would hasten to add that not for a moment do I mean to suggest that, wondrous as he is, there is anything Christ-like about Kim Dotcom - for one thing, dare I say it, a man of his stature would not be so easily placed upon the cross, even if he might feel at the present that he is being rather crucified, to speak figuratively).

Yet now the leviathan that is America would take from us that which but recently we have found, and we might again soon hear the laments of the forsaken. Our dreary and insipid country, bereft of colour and life, needs Kim Dotcom; the Americans positively do not need Kim Dotcom. That country suffers from the condition the polar opposite of our own; it is too bright, too colourful, too overblown with dazzling arrays of light. America has long since loosed its moorings from the piers of reality and drifted helplessly away into the vastnesses of an imagined existence which it fancies the truth. Its people already blinded by the tumultuous visions they behold, the presence of Kim Dotcom would surely drive them into the hinterlands of madness. But we here, in our dark and lifeless land, we have an urgent and fretful need of such a one who can bring light into the shadows and a floodtide into the stilled veins of the nation. Let us not lose what the beneficence of chance has brought among us.