Home stretch to election is upon us

The good news about Labor Day weekend being upon us already is that the venerable good old down-home Blue Hill Fair is going full-tilt, offering the natives a welcome respite from the ordeal of pretending to be unconcerned because the guy in charge of summer has botched the job.

The bad news about the Labor Day at hand is that it marks the start of the home stretch of the political campaigns leading to the Nov. 2 presidential election. Normally, that would be a good thing. But not these days. For the next two months we can run, but we cannot hide from the wall-to-wall assault of televised political advertising that has come to define the modern major American political campaign.

Down at the Blue Hill Fair, Dr. Wilson’s Traveling Medicine Show will pitch miracle potions to the paying customers and mesmerize them with sleight-of-hand that will leave them scratching their heads in disbelief.

The politicians and their handlers will do much the same, with one major difference: The traveling medicine show outfit presumably will offer its hocus-pocus with tongue firmly in cheek, sure that the clientele is not numb enough to fall for the good-natured nonsense, whereas the pols will hustle their bunkum with the fervor of a snake oil salesman who is convinced he has the hayseeds fattened for the kill.

About all one can hope for is that the pending ad assault will be more enlightening than the discourse so far, which has been mainly an adolescent food fight over who did what in a war that’s been over for more than 30 years.

Come Election Day, if you have not once had the urge to throw the family cat through the television screen to express your opinion of political campaigning via saturation 30-second attack ad you obviously will not have been paying attention.

With the windup of the Republican National Convention this week, that phase of the ordeal is over. And not a moment too soon. Some voices have insisted that such costly, ostentatious displays of partisan preaching to the choir – stripped of any sense of excitement as to the platform or makeup of the presidential tickets – have become irrelevant.

Since my contract stipulates that I may quote late Baltimore Sun political columnist H.L. Mencken as often as possible, let me suggest that if The Great One were around today he might not view the national political conventions quite as he did in a piece for the Sun after the 1924 Democratic gathering.

“There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging,” Mencken wrote in a column included in “The Impossible H.L. Mencken,” published in 1991 by Anchor Books. “It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming.

“One sits through long sessions wishing heartily that all the delegates and the alternates were dead and in hell – and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour…”

Although the adjectives “gaudy” and “hilarious” and “melodramatic” and “obscene” still could be applied to most national conventions, Mencken might find there hasn’t been one in quite some time that has been “unimaginably exhilarating.”

He tells of a newspaper colleague who, after covering the 1924 convention, vowed that he was done with them forever, that he would never attend another one in his life and “that if, by chance, I ever caught him at one or within a hundred miles of one, I should be free to knock him in the head, boil him down, and sell his bones to a dice factory…

“In one long and indignant sentence he recited a great catalogue of hardships – meals bolted suicidally or missed altogether, nights spent in pursuing elusive and infamous politicians, hours wasted upon the writing of dispatches that were overtaken by fresh news before they could get in to the Sunpaper, dreadful alarm and surprises at 3 o’clock in the morning, all the horrors of war without any of its glory. Twice he swore his oath, and then, for good measure, he damned the whole universe.”

Mencken knew that the man was mistaken; “knew that he’d be on hand for the next great show,” and those that followed, if able. As would they all. Once a reporter has covered a good revival or hanging he’s pretty much hooked for life.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net