I love the U.S.A.

I think it would be fair to say that Hollywood has run out of ideas. All the major blockbusters are re-makes of re-makes, another Marvel or DC superhero brought to frenzied, punchy, exploding life on the big screen. Some of them are fun; lots are tired and boring despite the squillions of dollars spent on effects. They’re lacking an original story, they’re lacking new ideas. Hollywood needs to regain its magic; it needs to learn from others who are able to constantly, almost on a daily basis, churn out jaw-dropping, mind-boggling plot twists and crazy characters. Hollywood just needs to angle its gaze to the North East of that fine country we call the U.S.A. and start taking notes from the Race for the White House.

Modern day politics can be a cynical business; it’s easy to become jaded in the face of blatantly manipulative spin, bare-faced lies and shameless hypocrisy. Thankfully this year’s Presidential election campaign has taken all those most loathsome facets of the 21st century’s struggles for power and turned them into the best soap opera in the world, ever. I have stopped watching telly. Why bother turning on Eastenders to see some whiny cockneys moaning about their half cousin’s step-niece’s lesbian relationship with her fag-smoking, binge-drinking 9 year old friend who turns out to be a 45 year old milkman (ok I haven’t watched it in a while, I pick up the plots by the gentle osmosis of sitting near people who do watch it) when you can fire up your Internets and watch Sarah Palin talking about being working class, then going out and spending $150,000  on designer clothes in 6 weeks?

John Stewart of The Daily Show recently described Governor Palin as a gift from God, and I couldn’t agree more. She is the glace cherry on the icing of the most delicious cake that has been this election campaign. We’ve had Ron Paul raising millions of dollars in a few days despite the obvious fact that he never stood a snowflake’s chance in hell of ever being made Republican candidate even though he is possibly their most intelligent, coherent member (perhaps that’s why he didn’t stand a chance?). We’ve had Obama and Clinton knuckling it out for the Democratic nomination, a tussle that could only have been made more exciting by the introduction of oil and bikinis (please God don’t try and visualise that, I just did and I’m going to have to have a shower when I finish writing this), and just when it all seemed to have settled down into an ideological battle between another stupid, old, white man and a young, vigorous, black man, McCain pulls, not an ace from his sleeve but a Sherman tank in the form of the unknown Governor of an enormous patch of snow. Mayor of a town of only 9,000 for a few years, then Governor of Alaska, she’s only just got a passport, left the US for the first time last year, already being investigated for abuse of power despite not really having any, she doesn’t know her arse from a hole in the ground – ladies and gentlemen of the United States, nay, people of the world, John McCain presents to you the woman a 72-year-old’s dodgy heartbeat away from having the codes to the largest nuclear arsenal on earth – Sarah Palin.

We’ve had Joe the Plumber who unwittingly spear-headed McCain’s campaign for a few days until it turned out that he had not just been economical with the truth, but he’d taken the truth, bundled it with some sub-prime mortgage debt, top-sliced it, sold it on to Lehman Brothers and denied any knowledge of it. We’ve had interviews which involved more winking and vacuous platitudes than answers, and debates where the seemingly endless repetition of “my friends” was meant to convince the American people that, whilst he may be a vindictive, short-tempered, small-minded idiot with no new ideas, that old Johnny McCain would probably still be quite nice to go and have a beer with so long as you don’t mind a repertoire of juvenile, racist and sexist jokes.

In all this I feel Barack Obama is really letting the side down. Not so much as a sniff of a gay affair with Joe Biden, resolutely refusing to display an inability to answer tricky questions like ‘what publications do you read?’, and generally being boringly pragmatic, intelligent, sensible and far too damn presidential.

I will feel a sad emptiness when this election is over and the US people have elected Obama to finally turn their country into the place it could be, rather than the disgrace that the warped ideology of the neo-cons have turned it into. Whilst I know this will be for the best, part of me would love to see another 2000 election with hanging chads, Floridians incapable of pulling a lever correctly and blatant, flagrant abuses of democracy. We have just a few more days of this pure, unadulterated, grade A entertainment, who knows what Palin can achieve in that time? I can’t think of anything worse than what she’s done and represented already, but I bet she can. Fantasy is boring, Hollywood move over, Washington DC is where it’s at.