Hildegarde

One of the things I have been trying to do this summer is to find out how to get my younger son–turned 18 this winter–registered to vote.

This is not as simple as it sounds, because Greg was born in London, and because he doesn’t have a driver’s license.  The driver’s license thing I thought was just the problem of being blind for half a year, but now it turns out that he doesn’t want one.  My older son doesn’t have one either, and Bill never did.

Now, what is not a problem, right here, is Greg’s status as a United States citizen.  A child born abroad of a US citizen is himself automatically a US citizen.

That was how the Embassy explained it to us when I was pregnant with Greg, and about a week after he was born I brought his British birth certificate and some other paperwork to Grosvenor Square and Greg got a concilar birth certificate attesting to his status as a US citizen and a US passport to boot.

Think about that for a minute.

The child of a US citizen born abroad is automatically a US citizen.

And Obama’s mother was…what, exactly?

Actually, I know the answer to that riddle.  For a while, US policy was that a child born to a US father abroad was a citizen, but not a child born to a mother. 

The other thing the US Embassy told me was that the SCOTUS had taken care of that.  Which would mean that even if Obama WAS born in Kenya, or the Philipines, or wherever, his mother’s status as a US citizen should legally have made him one.

But I really didn’t intend to write this post about the birthers. 

I’ve got all Greg’s documents together, and his social security card, and we should be able to get him registered well in time for the election. 

But because I’ve been trying to get him registered, I’ve been paying more attention to this stage of the Presidential election than I usually do.

And maybe that’s the only necessary answer.  Maybe I just don’t usually pay attention this early in the cycle.

But I’m paying attention now, and the whole thing seems to me to be…completely unreal.

I don’t mean unreal as in crazy, or surreal, or psychodelic.

I mean unreal as if it weren’t actually happening.

The whole thing just seems–superfluous.  As if nothing was going on, in spite of all the yelling and screaming. 

And I’m not sure why that is. 

Part of it may be that I’ve never taken Romney seriously as a candidate.  He is, it seems to me, the apotheosis of establishment Republicanism, but an apotheosis as abstraction.  There’s no there there, as Gertrude Stein said about something else.

If Romney has convictions–about anything–I haven’t seen it.  It was why I always thought the Republicans should have gone with Santorum.  You may like what he has to say or hate it, but the man has convictions and he sticks to them, even if it means losing primaries and elections.

He is also, I think, what the core of the contemporary Republican Party actually wants.  Because what the Tea Party is, first and foremost, is a protest against exactly what Romney is, no matter on which side of the aisle–the slick, the “sophisticatedly educated,” the guys who give bailouts to their friends who run the banks.

So, for better or worse, I never thought Romney could win the election.  I still don’t.  So the contest seems less than compelling even without the eerie feeling that it just isn’t there.

But part of it is just that everything feels like white noise.  And that’s true even when there’s a real story, rather than another round of they’re lying! no, they’re lying! no, they’re lying! in the plitical ads.

The Todd Akin thing is a case in point.  God only knows, the man is a complete and irredeemable idiot.  And it’s kind of fun to watch Ann Coulter trying to get him chucked out of his race by the sheer power of her own will.  She’s got one hell of a will, too.  She just might manage it.

But unforgivably vile as the thing he said were, the whole episode just feels scripted. Everybody is saying what you’d expect them to say.  The outrage sounds–as most outrage does these days–fake.

Too much of what happens here these days, politically, seems like an attempt to evade reality.

Rather than actually compete, on ideas or even on personalities, what we have is a series of Outrage Moments.  Obama said that if you have a business, you didn’t build it  yourself!  The Republicans are trying to deny women access to birth control!

Neither of these things is, or ever was, true.  Obama’s “you didn’t build that” obviously was meant to refer to things like roads and bridges, not your company.  And refusing to pay for your choices is not the same thing as denying you the right or the ability to make them. 

But that’s what we were yelling about before Todd Akin came along.  And although Akin really did say something that was substantively objectionable, the outrage sounds the same as it did when the bases for it were far less solid.

Greg, in the meantime, is taking this, his first Presidential election, every personally.

Don’t ask him what he thinks, or you’ll be nailed to your seat for hours.