When I was seven or eight, I decided to teach myself how to play the guitar.  Guitar for Beginners by Rennie Lester was at eye level, (my 4’-2” eye level anyway), on the rack in Krupp’s music store, so I paid the seventy-five cents and hurried home.  My older brother had a Harmony guitar that he had considered playing, but to my recollection never did, (maybe because the action was so high that pressing the strings against the fret board required Herculean strength).  I grabbed the Harmony, sat down on my bed and opened Guitar for Beginners to page one.  The entire page was filled with a line tracing of a hand and bore the caption, “LESSON ONE – THIS IS THE LEFT HAND”.  I decided then and there that playing the guitar was going to be a breeze…in less than a minute, I had already mastered Lesson One.  I still have the left hand thing down…the guitar, not so much.

Plowing through the endless barrage of ads and interviews, claims and counter-claims, speeches, debates and factually challenged exposés, biographies and polls, and the heavily biased analysis of all of the above, I am suddenly aware of the parallels between my guitar education and politics.  Or, more accurately, the preparedness of politicians for the jobs they seek.  As someone who has too often faked my way through a fake book, (before realizing that I needn’t pretend to be a guitar player to be in the music business), I have developed a keen sense of fakery, and in politics fakery is so nearly universal, I can only assume that somewhere, someone akin to the venerable Rennie Lester has penned a simplistic guide to success in that profession.

Governance is not politics and visa versa.  At the foundation of the model for America were the best and the brightest, who freely aired their differences in a political arena and then settled in between elections to altruistically implement policy on behalf of those they represented.  Today, politics is a 24/365 cacophony of sound bites, accusations and random nonsense bombastically verbalized by a merry band of men and women, many of whom would be challenged by Mr. Lester’s “Lesson One”.  The choice we have to make in sixteen days will include the election and re-election of a lot of stupid people no matter who wins at the top of the ticket.  We had eight years of batshit stupid that lied us into war and missed or ignored all of the signs of the pending financial collapse that will remain a burden for generations to come.  I’m going with less dumb.