Talking politics can be hazardous to your health

I rarely discuss anything remotely connected to politics. People today are so passionate and emotional about their political views, which they have mostly formed from reading the backs of foreign intrigue novels. To even bring up your political preference for a particular candidate, well, it’s like being in a crowded saloon in the Old West, surrounded by a bunch of drunken cowboys and announcing you are from New York City and asking for a glass of chardonnay.

This is why I hate to bring up the fact that I think the government of North Korea has hacked into my house. Nothing works. I know I shouldn’t be so quick to blame, but it has to be a political thing. My computer went down; once that was fixed, the printer went off, after that was hooked up, the cable went out and finally by the end of the day, none of the toilets would flush. The only thing left to do was obvious; just go out and buy a kayak.

Now, I’m not saying it was their fault, but it has to be someone’s fault, at least according to the talking heads on the media. Everything is under investigation, someone did it, but let’s not lose our minds and for heaven’s sake actually do anything about it.

It is similar to living next door to a teenager who is learning to play the electric guitar. At first you don’t notice it; it is just a noise in the background. But after a while, the noise levels reach the seismic rumblings of Mt. Vesuvius shortly before it wiped out the entire coast of ancient Italy in 24 A.D. The vibrations from the whole house shaking go on until you decide to just stick a knife in your head and go out and buy a seeing-eye dog. That is politics today.

Especially irritating on television are those roundtable debates where you have commentators with different opinions screaming at each other. These are the kind of people who were passed over for hall monitor in high school and were voted the most annoying person in their class.

But not all the political advertising today is centered around politics. In an effort to be fair, the networks decided to intersperse these advertisements with announcements about the most intimate parts of your body and what to do when something goes radically wrong (and it always goes wrong when it involves the intimate parts of your body). Anyway, at some point, it is difficult to decide whether you need a plumber or a cork from a bottle. Don’t even bother consulting your physician, since most physicians are now working at Home Depot.

One of the issues the candidates seem to ignore is just how difficult it is to get a bill through Congress. You can make all the promises you want, but achieving the intricacies of wheeling and dealing to make it happen are, well, just that, wheeling and dealing.

For instance, suppose you wanted to enact a law where every electric guitar in the country would be shipped off to a place, say Timbuktu, just off the top of my head. This is just a hypothetical question and has nothing to do with me personally.

Anyway, as I understand it, once a bill is introduced, Congress immediately calls for a recess so they may go out and hold press conferences nonstop to explain their positions. The most exciting part of the press conferences is the pants that catch on fire.

I’m not suggesting that Congress doesn’t get anything done, because in the end they all agree to pass a bill that would demand fire extinguishers be available for every press conference, and the electric guitar will not be banned unless another bridge to nowhere is included in the bill.

My advice, which is based on years of political study, is to just change the channel to something less upsetting like the reality show, “Zombies in your Neighborhood.” Buckle up people; the blame game is just beginning.