"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..." - Pete Townshend
It was an amazing event. It must have been. The papers had been full of it for weeks. Every broadcast outlet imaginable threw every resource available at it. Thousands and thousands of people crowded the streets, bridges, parks and rooftops just for a glimpse. It lasted sixteen seconds. And then life returned to the same routine order that existed before it happened at all.

"It" was the implosion of the Kingdome in Seattle. I watched from about 8 blocks away, and I have to admit, it was pretty cool. Big boom, big crash, big cloud of dust. But despite the disappearance of the big, grey, ugly mushroom from the Seattle horizon, despite the media circus that had multiple TV stations devoting four hours of coverage to a sixteen second event, despite the political, economic, social and aesthetic furor that surrounded the decision to blow up (well, actually, blow in) the Kingdome, it's done and not much at all has changed for practically anybody.

It's a lot like an American presidential election that way. The campaigns have become longer and longer, and more and more expensive, and the media has covered every angle so thoroughly that now they spend almost as much time covering the media coverage as they do any actual campaign event or candidate postition. And when it's all over, not much at all changes for practically anybody.

Sure, there are big hot button issues that get us all excited. If we elect an anti-choice right wing Republican then we'll lose Roe v. Wade, right? Well, since Roe v. Wade, we've had 12 years of anti-choice right wing Republican Presidents, and Roe v. Wade is still here. You can be sure that those Republican Presidents did their damndest to pack the courts with like minded judges, but those judges keep citing precedent, and they keep upholding the law. It's what judges do, mostly.

But, what about those left wing gun grabbers the Democrats keep throwing at us? I mean, if one of those guys gets to the White House, it's curtains for the Second Amendment, right? Well, while I'm not among those who considers the current Prez particularly left wing, he's sure as heck got the gun grabber rhetoric down. But as he nears the end of eight years in office, what's he got to show for it? Some relatively ineffectual waiting period and background check rules, some totally ridiculous and unenforcable bans on something they call "assault weapons," a term of art that seems to mean "guns the President is afraid of." Fact is, after eight years of anti-gun rhetoric and anti-gun legislative proposals that add up to the most serious anti-gun crusade ever launched from the nation's highest platform, you can still go out this very day and buy high powered weapons of an amazing diversity of descriptions with fairly little effort. And the Constitution still has a Second Amendment to fight about.

See, by the time a President vets his proposals with the various interest groups he owes allegience to, and sends a proposal off to Congress where 535 Congresscritters in the House and Senate go through a similar process with their contributors lists, not too much gets done about anything controversial, and what does get done doesn't bear much resemblence to what was proposed. Most of all, it's important that nothing gets done that will be perceived as a negative impact on the day to day lives of a significant number of ordinary citizen types. Big rhetoric and little action is the dominant theme of winning politics.

So what's the point of all the time, money and attention we put into these elections? Well, rhetoric can be symbolically significant, and symbols are important. The U.S. Presidency is largely a symbolic office, an expression of the national mood and the national will. Open, optimistic, progressive leadership says something about us. So does narrow, paranoid, conservative leadership. Who we choose for President says something about who we are as a nation.

But it doesn't have much to do with how we live as people. Never did, still doesn't. Because, when all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done.

And most of the time, that's a good thing.


(C) 2000 Shaun Dale