A diversion from spasm of loathing

It’s true that a surplus of undisguised hate and loathing easily trumped a paucity of good-natured humor in the seemingly endless presidential election campaign that mercifully came to a screeching halt on Tuesday. But if you couldn’t find plenty to laugh about despite this sorry state of affairs you may well be an old stick-in-the-mud, far too serious for your own good mental health.

Scenes of politicians trying desperately to be something they are not have always provided grist for a healthy snicker. Beyond the usual ostentatious kissing of innocent babies and the donning of funny hats to suck up to a particular constituency, this campaign certainly had no shortage of that phenomenon.

John Kerry’s photo-opportunity goose-hunting foray into a Midwestern cornfield, dressed in a borrowed camouflage jacket and trying his damnedest to act like one of the good ol’ shotgun-toting boys of the neighborhood in order to get the National Rifle Association vote, was pretty funny. When a reporter asked how he had made out and Kerry replied that each hunter in the party had bagged one bird, the answer had an air of being more politically correct than factual, which is pretty much how those things always seem to go.

Good for a few yuks, as well, was George Bush’s photo-opportunity visit to a Wisconsin cow barn, where he appeared to be lobbying a particularly demure Holstein for her vote while seemingly unconcerned about the pitfalls of walking through a stable in dress shoes without watching where he stepped. Hard telling what Mr. President and his entourage of handlers and Secret Service agents might have subsequently tracked on to the plush carpeting of Air Force One.

An excellent source for levity in presidential campaigns is the made-for-television human backdrop assembled by party honchos to enhance prime-time speeches by the candidates. Always politically correct and properly diverse, the standard human backdrop consists of perhaps 30 partisan cheerleaders.

It includes a smattering of fat-cat financial backers and high rollers, the requisite ratio of females to males, a sprinkling of ambitious young upstarts balanced with a contingent of old-fogy warriors from campaigns past, and, if they can be rounded up on short notice, at least one Common Man and Woman in each skin color known to God – all of them smiling broadly, freshly scrubbed for the occasion and ready to madly applaud the candidate at the first hint of a coherent sentence.

One scene from the recent campaign comes to mind as typical of the genre. I don’t recall whether it was from a Kerry rally or from a Bush production. But it makes no difference, because it could have occurred in either venue.

As the candidate worked himself into a lather in listing his opponent’s massive shortcomings, the human backdrop dutifully entered into its Solemn Occasion Mode, displaying a collective poker face that those hot-shot world-class poker players who are all the rage on television these days would die for.

But one old gal standing behind the candidate’s left shoulder and thus locked into the picture, no matter how tight the camera angle, was having none of it. No poker player, this one. Not a successful one, at any rate.

At each mention of the opposition’s misdeeds the lady shook her head slowly from side to side, the weight of the wickedness hanging heavily on her shoulders and a pained look upon her face as though she may be experiencing some kind of frightful gastric disturbance. Occasionally, she would hang her head at the shame of it all, and once when a particularly egregious sin was cited she rolled her eyes heavenward in animated editorial comment.

The performance was mesmerizing, much as a horrible wreck out on the open highway can be to a morbidly curious motorist edging by and trying to sneak a peek at the carnage while pretending not to do so. Talk about stealing the show. Talk about upstaging your candidate.

Campaign bumper stickers provoked laughs during the campaign. “Keep America From Committing Hari Kerry” was a good one. And the foreign press came up with some creative zingers, including a London Daily Mirror reference to Bush as “The Yellow Rogue of Texas.”

The British tabloid also devoted its front page to a headline insulting America by asking “How Can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?” – a condescending slur mirroring the Bush-loathing mind-set of the elitist Hollywood entertainment industry and some major media outfits in this country.

Granted, watching this faction come totally unhinged because of Tuesday’s election results may be sadder than it is funny. But it sure is some old satisfying.

Columnist Kent Ward’s e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net