Thursday, December 1, 2016

Bathroom Talk and the Election

by Meg Sonata

While democrats bang their collective heads against walls in DC, the media conduct surveys to discover the in-depth answer to such a difficult question: Why did the democrats lose the 2016 election? Perhaps myopia is the real challenge. Out here in the real world, Americans have a real problem with a president, party, and candidates who spend more time on bathrooms than they do on national security. Perhaps Americans are also tired of hearing more talk about sex and women than they would encounter at women's clubs, the PTA, and any sorority that we can name. A campaign which focuses on women to the exclusion of men loses half the population in the voting booth. Is that fact hard to understand?

Whether Donald Trump is a genius or not, he must be smart enough to recognize that the national conversation has been boring for, oh, about eight years now. We are talking about "boring" with a super-sized, inflated and pixilated capital B. How many hours do we devote to talking about bathrooms in our everyday lives, oh America? The obvious answer is not any more than we can help!  If they are functional and clean, that's good enough for the majority in this land of the free and the very brave--except when it comes to talking about bathrooms, unless we are shopping at Sears or Home Depot, and they are having a great sale on hot tubs and sauna installations in our own home, and we never saw prices like these. 

Has anyone noticed? Donald Trump does not do boring. This analysis may seem too simple for the modern mind to embrace, but he won, and the Bathroom talkers lost. Does it get any simpler than that? Since the founding of this republic, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and even that Parisian sophisticate Benjamin Franklin did not make headlines by chattering on and on about bathrooms. Maybe, just maybe, this country does have its own distinctive culture, and one of its basic principles is that Bathroom Talk is always out of order. We can settle problems concerning lavatories out of the public eye, and with considerable attention to details in discussions with plumbers. Otherwise, upgrade the dialogue and get on with life.