I Freaking Hate Primary Season

This is just going to be a pointless, meaningless rant. Too long for a comment, and too trivial for a frontpage post: gawd, I freakin' hate primary seasons.

It may yet be, when future historians take final measure of our own days, that the fullest and most substantial use of the internet will turn out to be posting pictures of cats with misspelled phrases under them, little musings like:

Yur human sol...

... I eated it

Everything beyond that simple usage will be deemed to have been an abject failure, a social experiment gone awry. It may yet be that the internet's truest form was the form it took in its frontier days, with roving bands of socially maladjusted nerds stealing away to dark corners in order to peck out their most earnest thoughts about what might happen if Captain Kirk had access to mobile suit technology, and battled Mothra in an attempt to reclaim the Quantum Twenty Sided Die of Glaxxor from the ice dungeons of Niblet Three.

I don't know. But gawd help us all, I am freaking sick of primary season. I'm sick of the participants in primary season. I'm sick of the people telling the other people to be nicer. I'm sick of posts, like this very one, that complain about it, and posts that complain about the complaining about it. That's how sick of it I am: I have fallen into the seventh circle of Internet hell, a place populated until now entirely by Viagra spammers and Nigerian diplomats, unable to sputter out anything but my general, bitter astonishment at the premise that democracy is actually even feasible, given how fragile the human psyche is and how prone to social short-circuiting even the most well educated and civilized individuals can be.

I'm friggin' tired of all of it. Both sides, all sides, whatever.

I'm friggin' tired of people ascribing opposition to their candidate to irrational "hatred", while their own equally vitriolic, mean-spirited opposition to the other candidate is somehow heroic and noble. It makes my forehead burn from the heat of the irony: I have blisters inside my sinuses.

I'm sick and tired of people offering up self-absorbed, self-absolving GBCW entries because they were so terribly put-upon, then wandering over to other sites and demonstrating the exact same behavior they supposedly so roundly abhorred. And, golly gee, getting praised for that same behavior. And not recognizing the irony of any of it, because that would require actual introspection. It makes me want to staple large slabs of posterboard to my earlobes and attempt to play "Flying Nun" off of the nearest sea cliff.

I'm sick of supporters pretending that every statement of opposition to a candidate consists of unfairly bashing that candidate or "hating" that candidate or being a secret Republican. I'm sick of supporters who can't come up with any rational reason for someone to vote for their own candidate other than "the other one sucks". It makes me want to give up politics, curl up with my collection of Bullwinkle collectable cups, and stage a version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead starring cylindrical transparent Boris and cylindrical transparent Dudley Do Right.

I'm sick of jackasses sanctimoniously declaring that, by golly, they'd rather vote for the anti-abortion, pro-war, pro-executive-power, pro-everything they fought against Republican candidate if their candidate doesn't win. Because, after all, working against every value they previously professed to believe is just fine, if it allows them a moment of selfish, ego-driven pride at sticking it to some small passel of anonymous people on the internet who may have insulted them. Honestly -- that's not even as noble as choosing the Nader option. It's more like choosing to run off and join David Koresh's cult because Cindy Brady never answered your fan letters.

And I am sick of people pleading for other people to stop fighting. Honestly, give it a rest: people aren't going to stop fighting, just because more pleasant and rational people ask them to. The people who want to fight will fight; the people who don't want to fight haven't been. You can't be forced into becoming an asshole: you have to strive for it. It takes practice. It's not like cooties or leprosy; you can't catch it from a website, or a campaign flyer, or a toilet seat. You've got to be born with the right genes, and if you have been -- congratulations. You're an asshole.

Yes, this primary season has demonstrated is that there are as many unintelligent, sanctimonious, one-note, willing-to-lie-for-their-cause liberals in this country as their are conservatives with those same attributes, and it is all profoundingly embarrassing. The candidate fights, the "boycotts" and "strikes", the umpteen sockpuppeting trolls that think sockpuppeting is now noble, if they do it for Obama, or Clinton, or (God help us all) Nader or Gravel or Ron Paul or Mayor McCheese. I'm sick of banning people for the third or fourth or fifth times after they managed to so badly insult other community members that the community autobanned them back to the bronze age, but by God it's the community's fault for not listening to their goddamn drivel and taunts like they should have. Yes, yes. You're the martyr. You and the last hundred other equally enlightened people fighting for their right to make "cunt" jokes, or have ten different sexually explicit usernames, or opining that Reverend Wright helped Monica Lewinsky kill Vince Foster in order to cover up the Power Rangers' involvement with 9/11.

Every doped-up third-rate basement anarchist on the internet fancies themselves the next incarnation of Abbie Hoffman. Every college kid who ever made a poop joke thinks they're the natural born leader of a new, poop-joke riddled revolution. And thus, a thousand online flowers bloom, all lacking sunlight or water but having access to truly awe-inspiring amounts of fertilizer.

But there is hope, and it requires absolutely no pleading, or effort, or anything else. If there's one good thing about primary season, it is that, hopefully, when it is all over all the people who were just in it for their own particular sports team -- sorry, candidate -- will go the fracking hell away, and leave the people who are serious about trying to get something done even if the candidate that finally gets chosen isn't the one they chose. And given that neither Obama nor Clinton got nearly as much initial support as Edwards, on this site, that's probably going to be a heck of a lot more users than either the Obama or Clinton partisans presume.

I have an audacious belief -- I believe both Clinton and Obama are frequently pandering, mealy-mouthed politicians who have time and time again refused to stand up for decent principles because they were each preparing so desperately for their own runs at still-higher office. I think both of them will be tremendous disappointments, unless they are forced into greatness by the profound future displeasure of their own supporters. I don't think you can remain silent in the face of torture or war and call yourself a true leader. I don't think you can moan about manufactured trivialities like "flag burning", of all things, and pretend your concern is genuine. Those are the attributes of a politician, but not of a great man or woman. It is left to pseudonymous denizens of the internet, to the nobody authors of barely-glanced at letters to the editors, to vent their astonishment at the inherent cruelty and futility of torture, and how easily it can be condoned via the application of sufficient legalese. It is left to random sign-holders on street corners to point out that to lie about war is to condone an atrocity. It is left to the rabble to be unnerved at the willingness of the powerful to dismiss illegal acts of the powerful.

But given that natural politicians, in the derogatory sense of the word, are the only types of person who can get succeed in politics in this country, so be it. After the game show battle that we call democracy is over, I'll vote for either of our final candidates, and I don't consider either of them the root of all evil -- only profoundly imperfect. I don't think either of them deserve scorn merely because they are supported, on the internet and in real life, by phalanxes of people who have taken leave of their senses in their desperate attempts to demonstrate some sort of divinity on their behalf, or prove that the other candidate plays cards with Satan every Tuesday.

I think anyone looking for peace in primary season is deluding themselves. Anyone who has chosen to invest themselves so fully in a person -- a politician, no less -- will fight until hell freezes over, or at least until six months after the primary season is over. It doesn't really matter how many bridges they have to burn to do it: that's how politics is expected to be played, these days. And it is pointless to ask it to change, because the most hostile people have no intention of listening. It is pointless to do anything but vent, just to give some small solace to others that no, the entire world is not made up of people who take offense at the drop of any hat, or who declare themselves the most capable and experienced handlers of any cherished philosophy.

There: my own venting is done. It was pointless, and meaningless, and took time away from a thousand other things. But I too am a creature of habit, and given that I have no cats to take humorous pictures of, I am resigned to my own circle of hell.