Last night, I picked my daughter up from soccer practice around 8 and came home to have dinner with the family. We nommed burgers grilled to perfection by the other members of the Catican staff and watched Pawn Stars. I'd been following the convention on Twitter and had seen people raving about Chris Christie and Ann Romney. After everyone had dispersed from the family room, I wandered out to the Catican, fired up the old PC and took a look at the videos on C-Span.
After about 3 minutes, I gave up and wandered back inside. I'd heard all the good lines retweeted over and over again, but when you watched in 1-1 time, it wasn't that interesting. I've seen plenty of these conventions and they don't grab me any more. It's not that I'm cynical or don't trust them or get angry, they're just not interesting any more.
I guess I'm waiting for the highlight reel.
To be honest, I never could get into political conventions. When I was a kid, I thought that they were the pure, concentrated essence of dullness, and I kind of still feel that way now. They are like golf - presumably fun for the participants, but painfully boring to watch as a spectator.
ReplyDeleteI remember back in 1976, during the Democratic convention, my brothers and I were home alone while our parents were at a Farm Bureau meeting, and we had the chance to stay up late watching TV - and both of the channels we could normally get had nothing but convention coverage. So we were scanning through the dial, including fooling around with aluminum foil on our normally-useless UHF antenna to see might be skipping in, and kept getting these ghostly, remote, barely-viewable signals that were *all covering the convention*! Finally, we managed to pick up a Canadian station that was actually showing something else - and then the show ended, and they switched to a program that was *making fun* of the convention! Well, that was a little better. I mainly remember one cartoon they showed of a broadly smiling Jimmy Carter, with the caption, "Hi,I'm Jimmy Carter, and I need your help! You see, for this past year, I've had this coat hanger stuck in my mouth!"
As far as I'm concerned, that was the highlight of televised convention coverage.