Sunday, February 07, 2016

Wish You Were Here

It's still far too soon to start picking the next President of the United States. We still have to decide who wins the Super Bowl and the Grammy for the Best Record of the Year. Best Record, by the way, is different from Best Song, and if I have to explain it to you then you haven't been watching enough awards shows. A whole baseball season stretches out before us in addition to the second half of the NBA season. There are a whole bunch of major awards to be handed out still, including Best Bear Mauling in a Feature Film at this year's Academy Awards. It's not a sprint, ladies and gentlemen, it's a marathon studded with pop culture distractions designed to keep our eyes off the silliness going on up and down the campaign trail.
Now that both Ricks Perry and Santorum have suspended their campaigns, and Rand Paul packed it in, pickings are getting a little thin on the Republican side. Lindsey Graham will head back to the Senate, hoping that his voice will still be heard above the rustling being made by all those other rats scrambling to get of their sinking ships. Erstwhile third wheel Democrat Mitch O'Malley is headed home for Maryland where his governor's chair is probably still warm.
Finding venues big enough to hold some of these lollapalooza debates will now be considerably easier. Easier than finding arenas with the capacity to hold all the pyrotechnics, lasers, and Styrofoam bricks necessary to mount the production of Pink Floyd's The Wall. I mention this because Ohio's Governor John Kasich has announced that part of his plan to unite us as a country once again is to reunite the surviving members of Pink Floyd. It's all a part of his campaign's insistence on avoiding the "doom and gloom" rhetoric spewing forth from the Cruz and Trump camps. Considering Governor Kasich managed to turn his slightly less dark vision into a third place in the Iowa Caucus, he may have a point. He may have tapped into that heretofore overlooked voting block of conservative stoners.
In the meantime, as others are packing up their tents, the Kasich tour of the Americas rolls on. I do wonder, with his fondness for things less doom-y and gloomy which Pink Floyd album he finds brings us the best vision of our future.

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