Before I even get started on this thing properly, I want to make it very clear that this piece does not signal a shift in what you can expect to see from me going forward on this Substack. I occasionally step outside of the comfortable confines of the genre storytelling experience, and dip my toes into the waters of observational essays and philosophical musings. On rarer occasions, I will divulge a few of my thoughts in the socio-political or current events arena, and those instances are rare because much like the balmy Everglades, it’s an interesting location to visit, but one has to be careful not to get eaten by either mosquitoes or the rampaging reptilian overlords that survived the K-T Extinction Event, the ever-watchful gators that prowl the region.
Something that one shouldn’t fear, however, is the recently unveiled product from Con-micorp, a new fusion of man and machine that looks to revolutionize executive action not so much on the streets of a singular city, but across the entire nation:
I’m talking about Robocon, part conservative, part machine, and utterly lacking in personality!
Look, I’m a libertarian, so there’s no love lost for me with either of the major national political parties that trot out their latest and greatest obfuscators, liars, and dissemblers on a 2-year, 4-year, or 6-year basis. After a while, they all sort of have a tendency to blend together, and the ad hominem for each of these living, breathing cartoon characters almost write themselves. From Nancy Pelosi, who sounds like she’s been hitting the sauce harder than her husband got hit in the head with hammer, to Mitch McConnell, whose physical appearance can perhaps be best described as the bipedal result of a sea turtle and a basset hound cross-breeding in a hellish, Lovecraftian nightmare scenario, I and many other Americans would be hard pressed to find any members of the House or Senate who they actually find tolerable for more time than it would take to load the gun and properly wedge it in our own mouths.
What we’re dealing with here with Florida Governor Ron Desantis’s announcement, his ‘coming out moment’ as it were (bet he wouldn’t be too keen on having it coined just that way), is the presentation of a man who is asking the American people to vote for a man with all of the personality factor of a boiled potato.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m an Irishman, I likes me a good potato. And just ask Samwise Gamgee, there’s plenty you can do with a potato, they’re a very reliable and versatile bit of veg, yeah? They’re a solid, sturdy, staple food. But you don’t use potatoes to add color to a dish, or flavor. You put it in there for nutritional value and calories, and that’s about it. If you’re layering on sour cream and chives and bacon, all you’re really doing is using the potato as the base layer to sprinkle much more tasty bits and pieces on top.
The folks at Con-micorp’s PR department should maybe have tried to track down the memo on that bit of advice, because they sent their guy out there on Twitter with none of the equipment or programming that he would actually need to come across as anything more than an automaton with a human face.
I’m sure that the folks over at The Daily Wire won’t be quite so critical in their assessment of Ron’s big ‘hello’ to the public. I can just see Matt Walsh getting up in front of the microphone and saying in his very dry delivery style, “This is what this country needs, in order to clean up our streets and move this country forward.”
Frankly, between the two of them, I’m not sure which one actually has more presence of humanity. It’s somewhat telling and dreadful that someone could have a ‘deadpan vs deadpan’ contest with Matt Walsh and somehow threaten to come out on top.
I’m aware that policy is what actually matters in the political realm, when you get past the election cycles and into the actual nitty-gritty job of governance. This is perhaps the one and only hope Desantis has against the Ad Hominem Avalanche that is Donald Trump, a man who’s had more affairs than the country has states. The only kind of folks who’ve been stiffed by The Donald more than the veritable bevy of whores he’s surrounded himself with since the 80’s are contractors who worked on his various buildings and casinos over the same period of time.
At least they don’t have to go get tested….
But while we’re discussing the orange elephant in the room, do you think for two seconds that he’s going to let it go without comment that his biggest current political rival for the Republican nomination is largely funded by a small handful of mega-donors and moneyed interests? People like the previously mentioned folks at Daily Wire? There’s a reason I tied them to the imagery of Omnicorp from the Robocop films, dear reader.
And while I’m not inclined to throw my own lot in with either of these two gents if the Libertarian Party can elevate someone with a little more sensibility than the last crackpot they lobbed out there, a woman who ostensibly represents a collective of people who don’t like the idea of people telling them what they ought to do, who then went on to tell people what they ought to do (seriously, what the hell were you thinking Jorgenson?) the truth of the matter is, if my only viable options come this time next year are one of these two guys or Joe “We swear he’s not senile but for the love of God could someone get him to stop sniffing kids and shoving potato salad in his pants pockets?” Biden, then guess what? I may be forced to suck it up as someone who has taken a good, hard look around at the current state of affairs in the country and the world writ large, hold my nose, and vote for whoever’s got the ‘R’ next to their name on the Presidential section of the ballot.