It sounds crazy now, but every six-year-old boy — despite the rational Whole Foods manager or accounts payable executive he may eventually become — believes in his heart that he can make himself into some sort of Yoda/Serpico/Duke Nukem hybrid. It doesn’t matter that a six-year-old boy is way too young to know what two of those three things are: pre-determined knowledge of Al Pacino and heavily pixilated schoolgirl strippers is encoded into every straight male’s DNA.
Scoff all you want, but this phenomenon obliterates all parameters of gender, time and space. It’s the same reason the first werewolves bristled at a hint of silver, and why the daughter I’ll never father started ovulating when Michael Fassbender turned 30.
But then time happens, and our most insane ambitions — the ones involving warp-speed shark-cycles and Heidi Klum — fade. We age, fall in love and/or into a job, and work towards more tangible goals. In the second grade, I was sure I would one day become WWF champion. Today, I write okay poetry and like to get in the occasional 10-mile bike ride.
I once knew a guy in high school who was determined to write a treatise on the musicality of punctuation in the English language. Now he’s in the Air Force. And that’s fine. It’s not that we give up on our dreams — we simply cast them aside in favor of goals more worthy of our time and effort. Goals that, more importantly, have the potential to see us realize the execution of our own unique talents toward the common development of the cultural, economical, anthropological world.
Since the beginning of this election cycle, I’ve done my best to try and figure out Mitt Romney’s motivations for running. I never wasted my time with any of the other candidates; trying to understand the minds of Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry and Rick “Santorum” Santorum is psychological, existential suicide. It would be like “Ocean’s Eleven” if everyone in the cast had polio.
It’s clear why Romney ran in 2008: with the inclusion of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, it would be a historic match-up either way. And he, Willard Mittens Romney, would get to symbolize the victory, the triumph of Old White Dude over Black Guy or Lady. Of course, we all know how that turned out: the GOP nominated John McCain, who then proceeded to slowly murder his own dignity for half a calendar year. Romney retreated to Massachusetts to gray his sideburns.
I’m not going to insult your intelligence and run down why Romney got the nomination in the first place. When you come out on top in the kind of field he was competing against, it’s completely unfair, but also completely predictable, like a man with a sprained ankle and a learning disability beating a bunch of well-muscled torsos in a footrace.
Still, a Mormon cyborg with an IKEA ottoman for a hairpiece getting the GOP nomination during a particularly crazy, Christian-centric iteration of the party is pretty impressive. I guess nothing brings bigots together like same-sex nookie.
It’s the “why” of Romney’s decision to run again that concerns me here, and I think I may have figured it out. Plain and simple, Mitt Romney decided he wanted to be President of the United States. It’s the same sort of mindset that leads the rest of us to try and construct our own grappling hook guns from PVC tubing and fishing lures, but Romney has the money to back up his goose-f***ing crazy endeavors, whereas the Home Depot’s lack of a Burgeoning Vigilante line of credit is quite disheartening and, if we’re being brutally honest, unpatriotic.
And really, that’s what it all comes down to: money. Let’s look at the course of wrist-slittlingly unjust events, shall we?
1. Romney gets the GOP nomination, but has to outspend his conservative counterparts by tens of millions to do it. Like I said before, when you’re competing against Herman Cain, that’s just depressing. Herman Cain is more unqualified to be president than a sausage grinder is to be a YMCA counselor.
2. Rupert “I Ate the Dingo that Ate Your Baby” Murdoch rips Romney apart on Twitter. I’m surprised that reality even allows that sentence to exist. For video game nerds, that’s like Pikachu calling out Contra for perpetuating cultural stereotypes. Rupert Murdoch is — despite the recent series of scandals that have eroded his News of the World conglomerate — still one of the most powerful puppet masters of conservative media. He makes Big Brother look like Keven McCallister with a Talk-Boy. And this line of attack hardly made a dent in the national dialogue, because stuff like this keeps happening:
3. David Koch hosts a fundraiser at his Hamptons beach house for Mitt Romney, who continues to accuse President Obama of being out of touch with “regular Americans.” Let’s be clear on this: Mitt Romney wouldn’t know a “regular American” if two of them spat at him simultaneously from a soup kitchen and a Kia Soul. When Romney says “regular American,” his constituents think of a shirtless, well-oiled Ronald Reagan. This fundraiser was reported to have raised over $3 million for the Romney campaign in a single day. That’s more money than you or I will ever see, ever.
It’s as simple as this: Romney is trying to buy the presidency. It’s the only course of action he has. The Affordable Care Act — based on his own healthcare mandate for the state of Massachusetts — just passed the Supreme Court, and 60 percent of the nation is in favor of it. American citizens, for the first time in history, approve of same-sex marriage. More and more people are realizing that the current economic crisis comes not as a result of Obama’s policies, but as a result of the combination of the past 25 years’ political cronyism and the current GOP sabotaging the economy in an effort to make the Obama administration look bad.
But Romney is determined and, even if he isn’t competent, his checkbook certainly is. It’s a dangerous notion, that the presidency can be won on the merits of bloated financial status, especially at this point in time. Just do me a favor, okay? If you are at all entertaining the idea of voting for Romney this November, ask yourself this question: would you have trusted yourself, at six years old and throwing shurikens at the neighbor’s cat, with the most powerful executive office in the world? You Might Also Like:
