Today Is The Day!

Election Day – yeah well, it is, but today is also Godzilla Day.  Yes, on this day in 1954 the very first Godzilla movie opened in Japanese theaters and spawned a media empire.  Godzilla has been a destructive monster, a force of nature and a world-saving hero.  He has changed from good guy to bad guy with great frequency – like a pro wrestler. Which, if you think about it is all a good Godzilla movie is – pro wrestling writ large – a story told to hype a big battle between the good guy  (the face in wrestling parlance) and the bad guy (the heel.)  And with that analogy firmly established to have Godzilla Day coincidentally on the same day as our elections seems terribly apropos.

Pro wrestling comparisons with our politics have become cliché, but their commonality does not deny their reality.  Why just in the last 48 hours, Haley Stevens has either come to her senses or left reality.  Great hype – building up a decision and contributing to a story, demanding that you observe the resolution (the blow off in wrestling parlance) and be deeply, emotionally invested in the outcome.  And like any good wrestling story, it won’t really end with the blow-off.  Slow vote counts, recounts, litigation, etc. – just like the matches between faction members surrounding Godzilla and his opponent du jour.

When a Godzilla movie, or a pro wrestling match, gets made there are really two stories happening.  One is pure business – what story can we tell, and how do we tell it, that will make the most money.  The other is pure entertainment – the story we see on the screen.  There are also two stories with our elections.  There is the media story – designed not to help the electoral process, but make money for all the various media outlets.  And then there is the story about who shall compose our government and how it shall function for the next couple of years.

Godzilla movies and pro wrestling are made purely for our entertainment, so we don’t much care about what goes on behind the curtain.  Elections; however, are deeply consequential and we need to look through the media story to the reality of our governance.  Sadly these days too many stop at the media presentation and never bother with the reality of governance.  This results in some behaving as if a political party were a cult and a lot of people voting as if each vote were existential in nature.  It has also resulted in a lot of candidates that are media masters and government zeroes.  The last couple of elections have gone so far as to “recast” the story the media is telling (Biden two years ago, Graham Platner this time around) and so we see the media story become more important than the government one.

Simply put, governance is what matters and the rest of it is media outlets making a buck without benefit of a writing staff.  The media story is entertainment cheap to produce – and that is all it is.  Remember that as you vote today.  Pay no attention to the hype.  Save the hype for the new Godzilla movie that opens this coming Friday.  Punch through the media curtain and vote on what matters – governance.  Good government may not make for such entertaining news, but it’ll make for a much better life.