Temet Nosce

OK, so after the first presidential debate, I was informed I was supposed to be all like "Whoa, dude, bummer" or whatever and kind of consider ways to kill myself that would be messy enough to convey my deep level of chaotic despair yet efficient enough not to permanently scar my children when they discover the body or, ideally, significantly increase my outgoing carbon footprint with too big a carpet-cleaning job. They have to leave the van running the whole time they run those big vacuum thingies when they come out.

Conversely now, after the one-and-only vice presidential debate wherein Smilin' Joe Biden came out with his hair-plugs on fire and beat the nice boy from the Future Business Leaders of America scholarship award luncheon fundraising committee to death with one of his own torn-off arms and a pidgin Hiberno-American translation of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, I'm supposed to be buoyed and elated and noncommittal about the shotgun barrel I was supposed to have shoved in my mouth.

Suffice it to say I'm having some trouble aligning my emotional weather vane precisely to the winds blown at me by the dervishes of punditry. Post-event framing has become something of a cottage industry, with little self-appointed practitioners all alone in dingy, wind-swept, well-lit, cable-ready meeting rooms with coffee urns and a cold-cut spread making a series of plucky one-man (or -woman) shows with a series of media professionals wherein they proffer their completely genuine and searchingly arrived-at four to six paragraphs of prepared points of discussion provided to them by the campaign or the party national committee.

My kids are at an age where they are first learning to take notice of politics in general and how it operates (they were 9, 7 and 5 in 2008. I believe we skipped all the debates that year and I based the entirety of my voting decisions on what I imagined Pikachu would do in my place). They ask me a lot "who won." My first instinct, of course, is to vaguely repackage the question in about 11 seconds of mumbling to make it seem as though I were paying attention and then pivot into a totally unrelated four-minute soliloquy on the discrepancy between health care cost increases and income growth. This is not their favorite game.

What I actually do is tell them the truth: look, "won" and "lost" are media abstractions used to justify multimillion dollar budgets spent on CGI chyron graphics for bar graphs and squiggly line charts. I'm an American voter. I can't be swayed by razzle-dazzle 3D data points springing magically into life from Wolf Blitzer's abdomen. I can't even be swayed by politicians doing their pony show, offering "positions" on "issues" that might "relate to me as those positions are translated into policy." No, like most American voters, I decide who won before the debate starts, based entirely on my pre-existing political leanings, pick out the parts of the actual debate that justify things I already believe, ignore all potential cognitive dissonance and, finally, attack the contradictions to my stances as either unpatriotic or willful intransigence.

I walked into this thing on Team Joe. There was no chance I was going to walk out of it wanting to run my hot hands through Paul Ryan's Irish-black hair. Plus it was really really gelled up, so I don't know that that was an option, in a literal sense. My mind was well closed. And Uncle Joe did just enough to keep me sealed up, like Al Capone's vault, unwilling to open and teasing the world with my coy shut-ness.

I'm not entirely comfortable with it, though. As a parent, my first goal is to model behavior for my children as a citizen. Well, actually, my first goal is to make sure they don't die. Or knock any girls up. Or give country music a serious chance. But right after those things and making sure they don't end up with a degree in any of the humanities, my first goal is that thing I said before. Model something. I forget.

Oh right! I have my predilections and my preferences. The right way to decide whom to vote for is to consider the things they say as they say them, with a genuinely open mind. It is by far the harder path to try to find true unblemished openness, to quiet the raging questions formed by the prejudice of a single, necessarily subjective experience set. The state of total, becalmed receptivity to the offerings of the universe is so rare a thing among we flawed, petty, scrabbling man-animals, the ones who do it get called Buddha and have giant statues of themselves carved into hillsides for worship or in smaller versions displayed with unintentional irony as paperweights on the desks of college students after a semester of Comparative Religion. If I'm going to model something for my children, it should be universality; a transcendent state of connectedness that allows me to experience my fellow humans without the warping influence of jealousy or anger or fear or the memory of pain. Then I could show them something truly worth seeing, truly worth learning; not only informational but transformational.

I feel like I got there a little bit tonight.

But Paul Ryan does seem like a dick.