Uncle.

I've reached my fill. The length of the presidential election has unleashed a wave of such relentless, picky, position-justifying critical thought that I can't bear to read any more of it. I don’t care who it argues for or the ornate reasoning behind it. It is all so much thinking, so convoluted and abstract. I’ve started dreading it.

Here’s the thing. The people who love to talk about how complicated maneuverings will influence other, less sophisticated voters, are people who want to live in a world of thought and information. Political bloggers and commenters live for this stuff. A dense hit of information! That they can process by their made-up rules! About something that is important, so they can feel like they are participating! But they don’t have to really talk to anyone! Or experience anything that challenges their intricate rules! This is a particular trap for symbolic analysts like us, who get addicted to constant information and seek out thought like junkies. It is so easy for us to get trapped in our minds. As long as the information keeps coming, we never have to experience our lives and feelings!

And then! The critical thought spills over on to everything. Every position that a blogger offers has to be picked apart. Is it true in every extreme? Is there a counter example that dodges the blogger’s careful qualification that could nullify everything she said!!!! Does the post secretly prove your point, if you look at it through the double-reverse periscope of this one thing that happened one time!!! (Odd how much of blogworld supports your original positions once you know how to look at it.) Did the blogger ever once say something that could be read to contradict her current position? She has no more credibility, ever, because the real world cannot possibly be nuanced and people cannot hold two contradictory thoughts, the which they acknowledge and balance to match changing circumstances. It is relentless. It feels like a barrage of this one type of communication, which is useful for some stuff, but is really a very limited mode of dealing with the world outside your computer screen.

I’m interested in the presidential election, but I can barely stand to read analysis anymore. I certainly can’t stand to read counter-analysis. If it is very good, I can handle a personal reaction presented through a very strong lens (like, here’s how studying paleobotany informs my interpretation of the presidential campaign!). That’s still interesting. But otherwise, I’ve mostly given up. All that thought, spinning and tangling with other thought, to no productive end. It doesn’t make anyone feel good, except the person who got the little hit of serotonin when he clicked on ‘Post’. Even that doesn’t last, so you have to do it again and again to compensate for sitting alone in a dark room, bathed in the light of your computer screen.

I’ve noticed that it is bugging other people too, this analysis and cleverness:

This election has turned into some kind of bizarre series of rituals, like an season of Greek theater where everybody knows the plot and the audience is left to judge the work on the presentation. The parade of comment, counter-comment, conference call about comment, distancing from comment, and major speech incorporating remarks about comment is the real distraction in this campaign, diverting from a looming economic recession (a recession at BEST) and a tragic stalemate in Iraq. Rarely does anything good for the country come out of this exchange.

It is repetitive and not productive. It isn’t the only way to carefully hone thought. It is an addiction. It is going to be a long eight months until the presidential election.