Even for those sad types who'd turn off a football game to see something political, that spectacle Sunday night was uncomfortable and hard to watch. Hard in the way that you sometimes feel the heat coming to your cheeks when somebody else should be ashamed. And you try to turn away before you see more. Emphasis on try. Because like other sorry displays--think car wrecks--preliminary ratings figures show that nearly 28 million tuned into the main event Sunday.
Once we were trapped in a doctor's office, and the television in the waiting room happened to be on one of those programs, if they can be called programs, that feature the worst among us. And play to the worst inside us. Was it Maury Povich or Jerry Springer, and is there a difference? What was going on shouldn't have been on television at midnight, but there it was in the middle of the day. And children were in the waiting room, no less. We can't remember the exact details, but we remember thinking what was being said would have embarrassed a family if it were whispered at the breakfast table. And here were people who allowed their most humiliating secrets to be broadcast to the nation. And a few people in the waiting room couldn't take their eyes off of it.
But how many other folks turn on the sports channels in the mornings to watch two or three or four men shout at, and over, each other? It seems often enough that the "hosts" of the programs don't even believe the stuff that comes out of their own mouths; they just want to disagree and be disagreeable--because it makes for good TV, that is, bad TV. Which grabs viewers of their favorite demographic.
Now mix a reality TV host with a political campaign, and you have Sunday night.
(Do presidents have their vanquished opponents put in jail? Or is that too Venezuelan? According to media reports, there is a whole wing of the Evin prison in Iran that's dedicated to holding political opponents of the regime. But you know how the media lie.)
Do we really have to do this again? In the 1980 election, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan debated only once--and on Oct. 28, at that. Is there any rule that the American people have to be subjected to another one of these displays in 2016? Haven't We the People been abused enough?
When can we call the kids back into the living room? And will parents allow them to watch the news on any channel without a three-second delay? It's another four years until the 2020 election, but Americans must be looking forward to getting to it and writing off 2016 as an aberrant year. Maybe the candidates in 2020 can provide better examples. No matter who they are, they could scarcely be worse.
A note to the Commission on Presidential Debates: Let's not do this again soon. Let's watch football instead.
Editorial on 10/11/2016