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This Election Year by
Peary Perry | |
Someone,
a lot wiser than I claim to be once told me that the best way to cover up a lie…was
to tell another one as quickly as possible.
I’m not certain I agree with
his advice, but I will say that in today’s race for the office of President of
the United States, it certainly is beginning to look that way. Someone wrote me
the other day and said that in his opinion the last really ethical presidential
race we had was the Truman-Dewey campaign back in 1948. I was still a kid back
then, but even then the newspapers had predicated a run away land slide victory
for Dewey. You might have seen photos of Truman holding up copies of the papers
with the incorrect headlines.
As I recall, at that time, the newspapers
and the radio were the only method any of us had to keep up with what was going
on in the world around us. I can remember as a small boy looking at a globe in
my grandfather’s house and worrying over the physical size of the Soviet Union
as compared to our country. I wasn’t aware of the population differences between
the two countries.
My, how times have changed. Today in addition to newspapers
and radio, we have television, the internet, e-mail, text messaging, blogs, cable
and who knows what else. You can turn your television off for a week and for the
most part you won’t miss a thing.
The cable television programs seem to
repeat all of their news every fifteen minutes or so. It would drive me crazy
to talk about the same things time and time again and day after day. It makes
me wonder who actually writes all of these scripts. The newscasters take on a
zombie like appearance as they repeat their litany over and over again.
We
are so starved for content to fill up the quiet spaces in our lives that any and
every aspect of any person’s life is subject to criticism and conjecture. Why
anyone would want to be famous is totally beyond me. I liked what Paul Newman
said about his life. He didn’t want to talk about his movies or Hollywood since
that was in his opinion, business. He liked to talk about other things such as
racing and his charities. Paul Newman was a smart man.
The so-called talking
heads of both political parties are almost rabid to see who can put out the latest
morsel of innuendo or gossip about their opponents. I suggest to you that if one
of them liked green beans the other would be against it for some unknown reason
or another. On the other hand if their opponent didn’t like green beans they would
develop an argument to the contrary.
Anything to fill up the white space.
I consider myself to be fairly normal and so are the majority of my friends.
I hear the same argument from them as well. This has been one of the worst election
years they can remember. There is so much information being thrown at us from
all sides it is extremely difficult on a daily basis to study any of it and see
what it means much less determine if it is true or false.
The other night
I was watching some program and finally turned it off since you got about five
minutes worth of programming and about seven minutes worth of commercials. And
to make matters worse, most of the commercials were a repeat of something you
had already seen. I can only look at so many of these over and over before I want
to throw my hands up and go to bed.
Both the political campaigns could
do themselves a favor and stick to honest and truthful facts based on their own
knowledge and experience. Slamming someone else and doing so in a ten or fifteen
second sound bite is not the best method of getting your message across. Taking
things out of context or not telling the entire story is also demeaning to those
of us who have to sit in our homes each night and try to make sense of it all.
The
average American may be tired and disgusted this election season, but that doesn’t
mean they are stupid. Try talking up to us, not the other way around.
©
Peary Perry
October 1, 2008 column
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