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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
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Iceman

There are 938,000 hits when a user enters the word "cryogenics" into the Google search engine. "Cryonics" is what I'm looking for actually, and I learn that cryopreservation is not currently reversible and is in fact illegal in the United States until someone is pronounced legally dead. Looks like I won't be a popsicle anytime soon.

Suspended animation is what I'm really after, and it ain't happening. If I owned a gun I could just put a bullet in my skull and save myself eleven months of irritation. Guess I'll have to stick it out.

Before Sunday night, the illegal aliens, senior citizens, theme park employees and homicidal maniacs of Florida had been generally spared the incessant blizzard of presidential campaign politics that are unfortunately now a mainstay of the 24-hour news cycle. We could only speculate how unbearable it must be to live in Iowa, especially during a campaign year. New Hampshire looked brutal and cold until Hillary Clinton left for South Carolina.

We got lulled into a false sense that it couldn't happen here. Then, sitting innocently enough on my couch watching the painfully average first installment of the CBS miniseries "Comanche Moon," I got mugged by a short arrogant man from New York.

Damn if Rudy Giuliani isn't going to make everyone's life down here a living hell until January 29.

The former mayor of New York City has taken an unusual campaign tactic. He has chosen to forego most campaign activities anywhere until Florida's primary cranks into full gear, although he did spend a good chunk of television ad money in New Hampshire. He's essentially betting his entire hand he can win a "big" state like Florida and make up for the smaller gains that could have been made in earlier primaries.

It's an unusual tactic because until Sunday night I hadn't really seen Giuliani do anything in the state while these other primaries were going on. He hasn't been advance campaigning to the general public at all. Other than an abandoned pharmacy down the road from my house getting transformed into a campaign office, Giuliani has been conspicuously absent. He might have been in Bermuda the past two weeks for all I know.

But I know this commercial is just the first of many that will carpet bomb the airwaves down here for the next two weeks. Even if one doesn't own a television, it's almost impossible to escape presidential politics these days.

Telephone calls, mailers, radio ads, billboards, email, roadside signs, pollsters, campaigners. They get to you. And the messages that are being sold are without qualification half-truths, distortions or flat out lies.

Florida presents a unique opportunity for candidates to exercise their pander muscles. We have the Cuban vote down here, so it's almost guaranteed that most of the candidates will claw and scratch each other to denounce Castro the loudest and swear the clearly successful and not at all hypocritical embargo will continue.

We have old people down here too. Lots and lots of them. They vote in droves and take large amounts of prescription drugs and cash lots and lots of Social Security checks.

We have a significant Hispanic population. We have a very large legal immigrant population. We also have a large redneck segment of society, mostly unrecognized by non-residents, that is suspicious of foreigners and protective of its own image of America. We have the space program. The state government still can't figure out why the homeowner insurance market continues to rape the population, so you can bet a paycheck or two that several candidates will make insurance relief a part of their stump speeches. And we also have a large number of middle class citizens, and no candidate these days can go six breaths without mentioning the decline of the middle class.

Every state has its own unique issues, and every candidate still in the race will make promises they know they won't or can't keep regarding these issues. So until the conventions, which have become nothing but glorified coronations in the past few decades, every person in this country can expect to be lied to on a daily basis.

Which should make the next year really fun. Freezing myself until it's all over isn't possible. "Suspended animation" only returns 851,000 hits anyways.

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