The 2016 Election Follies

I’ve kept silent long enough!  This election is a blast.

I was raised in a family of Independents.  I wasn’t raised to believe one party was “perfect” and the other one consisted of “scum.”  I didn’t grow up with nightly dinner conversations that relentlessly praised the family’s designated party because we weren’t members of either one, and so what and who cares?   Ballots, I was told, are secret for a reason.  The reason is that it’s nobody’s business who someone else votes for.  Period.

If one of the parties came up at my house at all, it was usually after some friend of my parents would get hysterical about an issue, prompting my father to do an imitation of them later.  My father should have done voice-overs.  He can imitate anybody, and to perfection.  He can still do a hilarious routine of the family friend who would go hog-wild over this or that political news item, arms waving, screeching, usually in an embarrassingly public place like a café, at the top of his lungs.  He does another one of a different friend who’s in the other party and gets just as manic.   I’d do a few political rant imitations myself, of teachers who kept trying to politically brainwash the kids, and had some real doozies whose attempts to become my “political puppeteer” just didn’t work, except to give me a wealth of “material.”

I’ve heard there’s a regional element to a lot of this.  Which side goes the craziest seems to depend on where you live.  Where I grew up, though, a certain party tended to get a hundred times more hysterical, flew off the handle more often, spent more time attempting to control who their friends voted for than they did cultivating their friendships, and went far more berserk.  Thus they gave the Quinn family more comic inspiration.

Did they ever!  We’d roar.  We’d split our sides.  We’d consider it all quite a sideshow – right after getting past the fact that these displays were, of course, ones we had never signed up to hear in the first place and could have easily lived without.

These days, with Election 2016, the unsolicited party sales pitches, the name-calling and insanity has reached the best fever pitch I’ve ever seen.  I feel like the country has become like an episode of one of my favorites show of the 1970s, namely, the uproarious spoof that was SOAP.  “These are the Tates.  And these are the Campbells.  And this is….Soap!”

But though life may be a tragedy to those who feel, it’s a comedy to those who laugh.  Enjoy!

America has become a soap opera spoof! Here’s the cast of good old SOAP.