I Only Do What MTV News Tells Me

Holy shit, what day is it? Oh my God, I think I forgot to vote!

I can't even remember what the issues were this year in California, but I know there had to be something. Immigrants, gays... there's always some minority group we come together as one to condemn, villify and rebuke every early-November. It's a rite of fall, like Guy Fawkes Day in the UK, but instead of bonfires and fireworks, we legally ostracize entire groups for the great and glorious benefit of the white, English-speaking, odd-number-of-penises-in-every-act-of-sexual-congress-only-please population of our state. It sounds mean, yes, but remember, we have to do it to them before the demographics tip and then they can do it to us.

Although I should point out that, like Guy Fawkes Day, we will occasionally hang the pope in effigy. But that's because he's a) a non-native English speaker b) hangs out with mostly only dudes and c) wears a dress and fancy I-talian slippers. All kinda squirrelly homo. Can't be too careful.

As a direct democracy state, I'm used to having SOMEthing to bore me on my television through the early part of the new TV season with confusing, directly conflicting, community-college-production-level commercials telling me which organization of firefighters endorses what initiative. But no, apparently nobody wanted my opinion about whom should be governor of Virginia or New Jersey or congressman in someplace in New York or even if we should stick it to the gays one more time, this time in Maine. That last one really irked me; as a Californian, my vast anti-gay political experience really could have shed some light on the issue for them.

As it turned out, that Tuesday (whichever it was) came and went without me even noticing. I thought certainly, with all the buildup, we were coming to some kind of public vote on health care reform or what the proper public corporal humiliation would be in store for the soon-to-be-forcefully-deposed President Barack Saddam Hussein Osama. I watch cable news, so I consider myself informed matters of national import. But it turns out that July and August and September was all a bunch of sound and fury (and ire and terror and rage and anger and wrath and rancor and enmity and delirium and antipathy and contempt and I have a thesaurus, I do) signifying a significant return on investment for corporations buying advertising on the Rush Limbaugh radio program.

But really nothing else.

The only two votes in the whole country that matter, it seems, belong to Senators Olympia Snowe and Joe Lieberman. Nobody else's vote really seems to have affected anything.

Well, unless you're a gay Mainer.