Politics, Boring VS Interesting
One could be forgiven for not realising New Zealand had an election coming up. At the time of writing we’re about 2 months out and there’s been hardly a peep about it. Here in New Zealand politics has taken its cues from its native wildlife. It’s shy and likes to stay out of sight for the most part as a survival reflex.
If you do find some of it limping around in the daylight hours it’s probably because it’s sick and will be ejected from the Beehive post haste to avoid any more attention drawn to the place.
It’s a surprise that the election billboards that spring up everywhere aren’t camouflaged and emblazoned with messaging along the lines of “Sorry, just trying to get elected again”.
The UK on the other hand has been using the length of its critically acclaimed TV shows to decide the average length of a Prime Minister’s tenure, which is about 6 episodes long or about one season. In the case of Liz Truss a livestream of a lettuce outlasted her time in the office of one of the formerly largest empires the earth had ever seen.
The American system on the other hand is the redbull and vodka of politics, with the twist being that the Redbull and Vodka are being served in a retirement village. Both parties have had run-ins recently with its ageing population. Republican Mitch McConnell went to do a press briefing, starting off strong with an autopilot response to how well they were doing before petering out and staring into space in stunned silence for far too long. Eventually he was broken from his reverie by John Barrasso and quietly shuffled away. On the democrat side 89 year old Sen. Dianne Feinstein was gently coached multiple times to “just say aye” by colleagues voting on a new bill introducing record high military spending. My lovely Grandma used to get hassled by an alcoholic neighbour, who’d coerce Grandma by driving her to ATM’s to pull money out to support her habit. It’s nice to know society is being equally represented within the most important institutions in the land. Except in Feinstein’s case she was only supporting spending everyone else’s money.
Recently I’ve been experiencing the beauty of France via food travel bloggers. I normally wouldn’t be very receptive to this sort of content but there’s something compelling about a guy talking about the qualities of a pastry shortly before getting shoulder-barged by a cop in riot gear. French President Emmanuel Macron seems to be taking widespread unrest all in stride however. I guess when you’re French riots are just part of life. My question is how France still manages to have so many old buildings at all. Surely they’d have all been torched by now.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, a boring election is far more preferable to an interesting election.
