Hmmm. Maybe the “stick to sports” crowd has a point.
You know. The “stick to sports” crowd: The blatherers who cannot tolerate the sanctity of their sports section polluted with political prattle. They lecture yours truly about it frequently from the comfort of their blissful bubbles.
Stick to sports, they say. Author Brene Brown on the subject: “The ability to opt out of suffering and injustice or pretend that everything is OK is the core of privilege. ‘Today, I choose not to acknowledge what’s happening around me because it’s too hard.'”
But then there are weeks like this when we see a political process so pathetically broken that sports aren’t merely a preferable diversion, but to be lauded for their efficiency. The game starts, the game ends before the night’s over and the scoreboard tells us the winner. Ah, simplicity.
Sports are also open to analytics, which, while some choose to overdose on their usefulness, nonetheless represent a willingness to use technology for betterment.
But politics? Cue Captain Caveman. Unga bunga. Because that’s where we are. Specifically: an arcane, voting process bereft of enough modern technology, despite how “the most important election of our lives” didn’t exactly sneak up on us. Yet some marriages don’t take as long as it takes to hand count — hand count! — votes.
Is the best we’ve got? Bleary-eyed humans — many volunteers — left to count ballots long into the night?
Nobody can figure out a way for technology — and its inherent bent toward more objectivity — to help? Little wonder the Nattering Nabob of Narcissism and his sycophants lapse into hyperbole over the potential for human error. Know why? We allow the potential for human error. It’s unfathomable that a country awash, immersed and obsessed with technology can’t figure out a way to digitize and streamline the voting process to ensure timely results.
Instead, we subject some innocent Arizonans to count ballots a day after the polls closed, all while gun-toting goobers patrol the parking lot.
This is the best we’ve got?
Imagine if sports ran like politics. Howard Cosell would have jumped into the ring amid the Thrilla in Manilla and in his best Cosell voice: “It has been a typically tantalizing tussle between Ali and Fray-zhuh. But the combatants have decided they’re hot and tired. We will resume next Thursday in the 12th round to decide the winner. Don’t let the door hit you in the ascot on the way out.”
Or in the moments after David Tyree secured the ball to his helmet, the public address announcer in Glendale: “Your attention please, ladies and gentlemen: It’s been a long week. We are all tired. We will decide the outcome of Super Bowl XLI on Tuesday after we’ve had a hot meal and some rest. When we resume, the Giants will have the ball at the 25 with a minute left. Thanks for coming, please drive carefully and arrive home safely.”
The absurdity of the aforementioned examples underscores what we’ve experienced this week. Systemic ineptitude. What’s been billed as the most important election of our time reduced to hand-counting millions and millions of ballots.
You can’t do something as innocuous and irrelevant now as move an infielder in baseball without a corresponding parabola. But on election night with only the shape and direction of our country to be determined? That’s in the hands of Myrtle, Marty, Mitzi and Malik, who are holed up in some basement. Meanwhile, as technology rules us — we stare mindlessly but faithfully at our phones instead of engaging in conversation — we have no technological answer to the voting process that would increase speed, accuracy and objectivity. Which is the whole point of technology.
Ridiculous.
This in no way should be a criticism of our registrars and poll workers/counters. Their effort is noted and appreciated. This is about The Big Lie. The Big Lie: Lecturing voters about their civic duties, telling them it’s the biggest election of their lives and then making all of us wait to determine a winner. In an era of unprecedented technology.
Sorry, but can someone get to work on this? That guffaw you hear in the background is Captain Caveman snorting with delight.
At least there’s football to watch this weekend. A scoreboard. A winner. A loser. And all before bed. Go figure.
This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro
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