This just in: Ray Moose elected President!

It would appear to be final, since McCain has made his concession speech. The scary thing is not that Obama is president, but that we live in a country that voted for Obama.

How could it be that a man whose politics are to the left of everyone in the country and whose list of achievements fits on the back of his business card is not only elected, but considered to be the best thing since the i-pod? For my money, it's because we are a TV nation. The television trains viewers not to think seriously about anything, and so leads naturally to modern advertising, wherein a smiling and beautiful woman sitting in a car means that you must buy one (the car, that is). Similarly, a smiling and handsome man with a sonorous voice and an attractive theme about change and hope means you must elect him--serious content would actually be detrimental, distracting, like making arguments in your seventeen seconds of air time.

Just smile and look beautiful. The viewers have been trained not to think.

Think of it this way. If you were a social science researcher and you wanted to find out how Americans have been trained to make decisions by their communication technologies, would it not be your dream to conduct a nation-wide test with participants in every town? Well, the dream has become a reality, and the results are depressing, if predictable: Americans make decisions based on loose poetic associations of images and sound bytes.

The good news is that irrationality bites any hand, whether it holds a bone or not. McCain did well on the campaign trail until America formed the following "syllogism": an economic crisis happened after George Bush had been president for nearly eight years; the president in office is responsible for whatever may happen to the economy; therefore, Republicans have to go. Well, the Democrats gained seats in both the house and the senate, and their boy Ray will sit in the oval office. Every single problem that rears its ugly head in the next four years will land fairly and squarely in the Democratic lap, and Ray may find his nation of well-trained unthinkers turning "red" with anger.

Dum spiro, spero.