Why I hate election season.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t for a moment begrudge our ability and our privelege to choose our own leadership. Sure, I’ve spent 6+ years really questioning whether or not the infrastructure by which we do that actually works, but I’d rather have the ability to vote, and to question the system, than to not even have the ability.
That said: I completely f’ing hate election season when it comes to work. I hate it. With the white-hot passion of a billion dying suns. On an ideological level, I hate that campaign advertising has essentially become a vituperative exercise in misdirection and stuff that would be considered actionable slander if it wasn’t a campaign ad. This helps no one. This informs and enlightens no one. It merely plays to passion, knee-jerk reactions, and polarizes communities rather than inciting them to ask questions. There is an equal time rule for news coverage of candidates running for office, though somewhere along the way this seems to have become an “equal time for Democratic and Republican candidates only” thing.
And how do the respective campaigns monitor the equal time process? Why, by watching our coverage, of course. And this is where it gets blisteringly, brain-boilingly ridiculous. Several years ago, I came up with a solution: anytime we do a story on, say, candidates for governor, I put together a multi-split-screen montage showing every candidate for governor. There’s your equal time right there – you’re all up for exactly the same amount of time. This year, though, it’s already sunk to new levels of pedantry – let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a transition from one story to another within the same promo takes the form of a lens flare that starts at lower left and moves to the upper right. Now you’re likely to hear from some campaign that the lens flare obscured their candidate for a split-second longer than it obscured the other guy.
It’s enough to make me fall back on that most impartial of methods: Text On A Screen, Showing No Candidates. It’s also enough to make me scream, but the soundproofing in here, such as it is, couldn’t silence a moderately noisy mosquito.
It’s a month before the election, and I’m sick and tired of it already.
In tonight’s good news: check out this upcoming CD from a group called L.E.O. (warning: the page that link goes to will begin playing music to you immediately, just in case you’re at work or something), a sort of all-star collective of folks ranging from Andy Sturmer (ex-Jellyfish) to Bleu (??) to the Hanson brothers (!!) and numerous others, all put together in a style paying homage to ELO. Tasty stuff, actually. You can listen to the whole thing online (lo-fi of course), but some of it is really good if you’re into that kind of music. I’ll be trying to pick this up as soon as funds permit. Damned if there isn’t a lot of good music coming out right about now – and again, mostly not on the major labels.