Occasionally on this blog I encounter people of the glum, who have determined that the Obama presidency is of the bungled and the botched, and so they can no longer support it.
Instead, they have conceived a need, in 2012, to cast a ballot for Rugs, or for some third-party candidate, or have elected to remain at home, staring forlornly into the tubes, casting a ballot for no one at all.
These people are routinely countered by keepers of the flame, who arrive to sternly inform the people of the glum that a vote for Rugs, or for some third-party candidate, or for no one at all, is effectively a vote for the Republican presidential candidate . . . who it is now presumed will be—saints preserve all humans—Captain Underpants, a.k.a. Mitt Romney.
Yesterday, while en route to the acrosonic, I turned on winger AM radio; for, living in occupied territory, I consider it prudent to now and again monitor the occupiers, to learn of their hopes and fears, delusions and dreams.
Those people were mostly in various stages of orgasm, having concluded that this year's strange and unnatural GOoPer primary season had at last achieved climax, and now the blindingly white chosen one, Captain Underpants, would proceed to rid the White House of the Bad Black Man who had somehow taken occupancy of it.
However, among those folks too were people of the glum, who called in to mournfully low that they just could not support this most recent GOoPer latter-day saint, that he did not resemble enough the One True God, Ronald Reagan, and that therefore they would stick with Rugs, or select a third-party candidate, or stay home, by the fire, cleaning their guns.
At which time the host sternly informed them that casting a vote for Rugs, a third-party candidate, or no body at all, was effectively a vote for Barack Obama.
Now wait just a dern minute thought I. How the hey could a vote for Rugs, a third-party candidate, or for a pox on both your houses, be a vote for both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama?
And then it hit me.
Just as in physics, the planet has moved out of the Newtonian, and into the quantum age, so too, apparently, in their electoral maunderings, have humans entered the realm of quantum voting.
In which a vote for a particular candidate, or for no candidate at all, can at one and the same time be a vote for this, that, or some other candidate; for all and every candidate; for no candidate at all; or for something somewhere in between.
Or for all that, all at the same time. Or for none of it.
Brave new world.
The quantum nature of Captain Underpants was incisively illumed in this piece by David Javerbaum, who noted that:
Before Mitt Romney, those seeking the presidency operated under the laws of so-called classical politics, laws still followed by traditional campaigners like Newt Gingrich. Under these Newtonian principles, a candidate’s position on an issue tends to stay at rest until an outside force—the Tea Party, say, or a six-figure credit line at Tiffany—compels him to alter his stance, at a speed commensurate with the size of the force (usually large) and in inverse proportion to the depth of his beliefs (invariably negligible). This alteration, framed as a positive by the candidate, then provokes an equal but opposite reaction among his rivals.
But the Romney candidacy represents literally a quantum leap forward. It is governed by rules that are bizarre and appear to go against everyday experience and common sense. To be honest, even people who are experts in Mitt Romney’s reality, or “Romneality,” seem bewildered by its implications; and any person who tells you he or she truly “understands” Mitt Romney is either lying or a corporation.
Javerbaum pointed out that the quantum Captain, "in much the same way that light is both a particle
and a wave, is both a moderate
and a conservative, depending on the situation. It is
not that he is one or the other; it is
not that he is one and then the other.
He is both at the same time."
Of course, Barack Obama also shares this quantum nature.
Because, as we have seen on this blog, over the past many years, Obama is, on any given day, both a near-deity who can part the waters and heal dead fish, and a Manchurian Trojan Horse corporatist sell-out baby-killing beater of dead hippies.
This, naturally, is dependent on the Reality of the observer—who, in true quantum fashion, molds the observed, through the act of observing.
As Javerbaum explains: "the act of observing cannot be separated from the outcome of the observation."
And so, depending on the Reality of the observer, an infinite multitude of Barack Obamas and Mitt Romneys—as well as such personages as Rugs, Buddy Roemer, and Wile E. Coyote—are "each occupying his own cosmos, each supporting a different platform, each being compared to a different beloved children’s toy but all of them equally real, all of them equally valid and all of them running for president at the same time[.]"
It is comforting, this quantum voting.
For it means that, regardless of who I actually vote for, or even if I vote at all, I am "effectively" voting for Barack Obama.
How, then, can he lose?
He can't.
(This piece, there illustrated, also available in red.)