With tonight’s vice-presidential debate
set to launch the U.S. electoral campaign to new heights of rancour, I thought
I’d use this space to bring you a heartening story of true
hands-across-the-aisle bipartisan cooperation. Two little–known relatives of
the contenders for the Second Most Demanding Job on Earth (the position of trying
to convince Greece and Spain that Germany really does have their best interests
at heart is already taken, by someone who doesn’t really want it) have gotten
together to bring an eagerly awaiting world the one item of all items that it
will find indispensable in these politically uncertain times.
Who are these selfless benefactors of
humankind, you ask? (And well you may—although I already did it for you.)
The first is a distant cousin of the
President, an avant-garde visual artist and specialist in kinetic sculpture,
who goes by the name of Mobile Al Obama.
The other is an equally distant cousin of
the Republican presidential challenger—a small-to-middling digital multimedia impresario
named C.D. Romney.
In the best traditions of good
old-fashioned American knowhow and stick-to-it-iveness, these two have joined
forces, using the leftovers from their most recent critical and commercial setbacks.
For Mobile Al, it was 15,000 miles of medium-gauge coat hanger wire for a planned
retrospective of the history of dry cleaning, which fell through when he neglected
to pay full postage on the grant application. For C.D., it was a warehouse full
of copies of a less-than-universally-embraced attempt to create a new sensation
in a crossover pop music genre called “techno-funk fusion goth metal emo
Christian agnostic hip-hop”.
With a surplus of raw materials at their
disposal, our intrepid entrepreneurs have pooled their resources to give the
public something it didn’t even know it needed, just before the Great American Electorate
makes its latest weary trek to the polling stations. To a nation a-tremble with
anticipation, I give you…
The Swing
State
Prognosticator.
And what’s a Swing State Prognosticator
when it’s at home, you ask? (Believe me,
I did when they sprung this one on me.) The answer is simplicity itself (or a
reasonable facsimile thereof). As its name implies, it’s a handy little gadget
for determining how the vote is going to go in any one of a number of key
battleground or “swing” states.
Here’s how it works: each swing state is
represented by a repurposed compact disc, opposite sides of which have been emblazoned
with the insignias of the Democratic and Republican parties.
The discs are suspended from a wire framework,
allowing them to move freely. To determine which party will win the electoral vote
in a given state, simply spin the disc until it comes to rest. Note which side
is facing you, and get in touch with your bookie to place your all-important
election side bets. (This is America, after all—there’s nothing in the
Constitution prohibiting citizens from mixing issues of governance with free
enterprise.)
If tests with prototypes prove successful,
the Swing State Prognosticator may be available to the general public as early
as next week. Mobile Al and C.D. are already accepting advance orders, though.
You may purchase Swing State Prognosticators individually, or (for a small additional
fee) several at a time, complete with custom-made, lovingly hand-crafted
armatures.
C.D. and Mobile Al recommend that you take
advantage of the tremendous saving on unit costs offered by the full set of
fifty. This way (so their brochure tells me), you’ll have a leg up on all the
guesswork about what’s going to happen come Election Day. And to those who say
that this method replaces calm, rational analysis with nothing more than random
chance, I remind you that, in this election year, good sense and clear thinking
have long since taken to their heels and are in full retreat. After all, people
are still making wisecracks about the future of Sesame Street—as if that
fun-fur-covered cottage industry's merchandising revenues alone couldn’t balance the budget, with enough
left over to buy PBS outright and get Jim Lehrer at least one suit that looks
like it almost fits.
There has to be a way I can get a piece of
that action…I wonder how Sparky would look sitting in a trash can?
Uncle Fun
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