The Apathetic Person’s Guide To The 2016 Election

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Y’all. The 2016 presidential election is just under a year away and … yea, I don’t give a shit either. Do you get pumped for next Christmas? No, not this one in 40 days, the one that’s, like, 14 months from now. You aren’t excited about that? Good. You sound normal.

But why then are we all surrounded by people who are fucking jazzed? Hurting to vote. Hard up for democracy. It’s fucking omnipresent already, 300-some days out. We’ve had 92 debates, approximately six trillion tweets, and a literal infinite amount of online column inches dedicated to contrasting the subtle differences between Marco Rubio’s plan for border security and Donald Trump’s pubic hair. (They’re both embarrassingly thin).

God. Everyone’s so fucking excited. Election 2016! Election 2016! It’s the most important election ever. The next president is going to have to deal with deficits and ISIS and defISIScits and this one JUST. Matters.

No it doesn’t.

Everyone kinda craps their collective load when a two-term president leaves office because if there’s one thing America does well, it’s elect incumbents. It’s so fucking easy. It indulges our basest instinct to be lazy. We don’t know what to do when the simplest possible choice is removed from under us. Panic ensues, just because we need to learn nine new names.

I’m here to tell you to not worry. It’s okay not to give a shit! Presidential elections are not the HUGE MATTER OF IMPORT people make them out to be. It’s perfectly okay to be apathetic. I know I am. Which is why I’m presenting you with the apathetic person’s guide to the 2016 election. Who cares if it sucks? I certainly won’t.

So, like, what’s the big deal?

Well, presidential elections only come around every four years, which is clearly just barely infrequent enough to convince the majority of disinterested American like you and me that it’s worth getting off the couch and driving less than two miles, to spend 45 seconds standing up and pressing no more than seven buttons.

Frankly, it’s an exhausting ask of our government. Personally, I would much prefer that presidential elections were held at a much greater interval. Every two decades or so. Hell, people in Libya didn’t have to vote for 46 years. Think about how awesome that must have been. Forty six years of straight chilling.

Okay, but like, really, what is the big deal? The one everyone is making a big deal about?

Ostensibly, whoever is inside the Oval Office for the next four years will allegedly set the agenda of the nation. OHHH. Big stuff! Are we gonna be super liberal and publicly flog the well-to-do by shoving ATMs up their butts so we can literally pull the cash they stole from us straight out of their own asses? Are we gonna be super conservative and make taxes so low that eventually the federal government will be required to operate on an annual budget of no more than $33 (which like fuck ain’t going to three twelve packs of condoms for Planned Parenthood).

But like … actually? Neither of those things will happen. Pretty much ever since the late 1960s a great sense of inertia overtook everything. Some blame Nixon for fomenting great distrust. Others feel technology and the media have ushered in a constant campaign that makes governance impossible. I think that was just around the time everyone realized they don’t have a boss. The president? He doesn’t have a boss and really technically neither does anyone in Congress. So like why the fuck would anyone do work when they don’t have to?

You think elected officials are somehow fundamentally better than us? Fuck no. The entire federal government now consists of nothing but 600,000 daily emails that state “Let’s circle back on that” so everyone can cut out around two.

It really can’t be that bad, can it?

Sure. When’s the last time you did work when your boss was out of town? Now imagine your “boss” is a nebulous concept of citizenry seven states over. One hundred dismissive wanking motions as you decided to call it a day after lunch.

Alright fine. So it doesn’t matter. Whatever. I still want to know what’s up with everything.

Glad you asked! (Jk I’ve been stalling this whole time. I didn’t do any research, but let’s try anyway.)

So this election is “interesting” (more dismissive wanking) because in a lot of ways, the past eight years have been both a resounding success and a catastrophic failure (If they ever build a monument to Obama’s presidency it’s gonna be the world’s largest shruggie emoticon) and no one knows what to say about it. For certain, Barack Obama inherited the worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression, but handed that, he’s done an amazing job of helping rich white people recover their losses while doing almost nothing for the lower and middle class, who are now stuck in a cycle of stagnant incomes and perpetual unemployment.

But because he’s a Democrat, Republicans wanting to take the White House have to run against his entire record despite the fact that everything Obama’s done gives them raging erections at the mere thought of it (/faux angry grumble “He let corporations write his healthcare law!” *explosions of come* /pretend indignation “His drone program is unlawful!” *drowns in a sea of their own ejaculate*). That’s why anything remotely resembling a good Republican candidate has stayed home. You can’t hate Obama (which the Republican base requires) and campaign against his policies (which our inherently antagonistic political system forces you to do) and formulate anything that remotely resembles a coherent thought. It’s pretty fun to watch.

So like, conversely, are liberals running against Obama?

Nah, man, because that would, like, fuck the whole system. Plus, he kept the wealthy wealthy and you gotta stand by those folks to win the White House .

So it’s a really shitty field?

Oh boy is it. But lucky for you, there’s a lot of candidates you can dismiss completely outright. Not because they won’t get elected – they sure as shit could; this country has done absolutely stupider things much more frequently — but because they won’t make a big difference once they get into the Oval Office.

Like who?

All of them! Every single candidate running. Again, look at what Obama did. He rode into the Oval Office on a promise of hope and change and a rebuilding of relations with the Muslim world and culpability for Wall Street and the end of Guantanamo Bay and ten inch dicks for every single dude. In eight years he managed to give nine people health care that costs them $3,500 a month and only barely prevented the entire American system of governance from collapsing upon itself.

And no one, none, not a single fucking one of the people running this year are setting their sights even remotely that high. Like all of them at most have maybe one task they wanna achieve. Which they won’t. So don’t worry if Donald Trump gets elected. He isn’t going to deport 20 million immigrants. And if Ted Cruz wins, his proudest accomplishment will be spinning around in the big comfy chair that sits behind the Roosevelt desk. (“Look at me go whee!” he’ll say.)

Even if Bernie Sanders manages to ride an anti-plutocratic sentiment into office, he isn’t going to tackle income equality. Remember Dodd-Frank and how the Dow Jones isn’t experiencing insane, runaway, unsustainable growth right now? Maybe Carly Fiorinia could take office and implement her three page tax code, but that won’t make it through Congress without ten hundred thousand amendments and an agreement not to implement it until after the sun goes white dwarf.

So entitlements, which are a blight on our budget will not be reformed. The deep social and economical divisions in our country will not be overcome. The debt will continue to soar and we’ll keep accidentally sticking our war dick in the wrong places and each party’s animosity toward the other will grow and rise as America continues to teeter on the razor’s edge of fiscal, societal, and political collapse, with only the great collective weight of our own torpidity preventing us from completely tipping over and allowing us to fall and end up the shattered, disgraced failure of four people’s idealistic dream from 250 years ago.

That seems fucking bleak.

Yea. You didn’t click on the optimist’s guide to the 2016 election.

True… but like, there’s gotta be someone out there, a candidate who shares my sense of apathy, my lack of desire to participate in the utterly pointless circus, someone whose anger at the inanity of this embarrassment is rendering itself into an inability to express articulate emotions about the absurd state of our nation and the farce we continue to perpetuate.

Why yes! There is!

OMG! Who??

Jeb Bush.

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