Remembering the Election of 2010

As the local polls were closing last night, I sat in the American Idol Experience in Disney’s Hollywood Studios, outside of Orlando. This is of course only partly by choice. The trip I had every say in, and the Election Day Hollywood Studios visit I agreed with. The American Idol Experience? I guess I acquiesced to that. Our friend, our hook-up for Disney goodness, was working on that particular entertainment, so we stopped by to give it a look.

Election Day is one of my favorite days ever. I’m a political junkie, in the good way and the bad way. The good way is that I’m actually informed, I want to be more informed and I’m always happy to be wrong. The bad way is that I can descend into treating politics like a sport and not the very serious process by which our self-governance is determined. I root for my team, and I can be a jerk about it in the same way that Yankees fans are.

But Election Day is the one day when it all comes to a head, when the body politic makes its decision and events for the next cycle are put into motion. And elections have consequences, be they wars or tax policies or whether certain people can sit in certain sections of buses. So it’s a holiday for me, and watching the results is something that I traditionally set aside time for. And it can be a very happy night, or a colossal nightmare of a night. I’ve had euphoria that lasted months, and some bitter bitter hangovers, both real and symbolic.

But a vacation was planned, and it coincided with Election Day, and there I sat. The set was nearly identical to the set that you see in that very popular television series — an expensive array of lights and video monitors, a table for the judges to sit at (complete with cups with Coca Cola logos on them), and a spacious house for the screaming crowd, who are happy to scream. For all of the rides/experiences at Hollywood Studios we visited yesterday, the AIE’s crowd had the very least of ironic distance. They treated it as if it was the actual show. And the contestants are actual park visitors (guests, they are called) who are culled from a day’s worth of auditions, that are basically the same show we sat at, running once an hour or so, five times previous. The show we were at featured the five earlier winners, and the winner of this show would get a pass that would put them at the front of the line for an actual American Idol audition somewhere in America for the next season.

In the course of the day, the early morning flight, the nap, dodging Florida rain showers at the park, I’d managed to forget that today was Election Day. I’d stayed clear of anything resembling a computer, and any radio other than Central Florida Top 40. It wasn’t until the fourth contestant that I borrowed my wife’s iPhone to check my email that it was seven and that local polls were closing.

Last week I’d imagined that we’d get to Florida and I’d spend my day going to polls, trying to counter-intimidate the people who were trying to intimidate non-Republican looking voters from voting in the interest of preventing “Voter Fraud,” which plan of course evaporated in the frenzy of the actual vacation. The fourth contestant was a slight girl from the north of England, who was doing a very convincing little pop number. The judges, who had some actual music industry experience but were cloyingly emulating the personalities of the TV judges liked her very much, except for the Simon Cowell-judge, who said the nice thing and then the well-rehearsed mean thing. The crowd booed, because the crowd was told by the able warm-up guy that they were supposed to do so. They didn’t need to be told that; they were veterans of TV watching, and being in the fake-TV audience was a dream come true for many. I still liked the slight British teen’s chances.

The last contestant was a recent mother from the Midwest, closer to my age than the teen’s. She did not have a TV aspect. She looked actually normal. She sang “Independence Day,” a Martina McBride song also popularized by “American Idol” winner Carrie Underwood. Carrie, and other “American Idol” luminaries, including host Ryan Seacrest, had recorded videos that were played during the experience that gave the impression that they were actually there and not in some studio years before. The audience and the contestants ate it up. It was awkward, at least to me. The host, who Ryan “introduced,” missed his mark, leaving video-Seacrest staring at an empty stage, and when Carrie congratulated an actual contestant, the contestant blushed like actual-Carrie was actually-congratulating. It’s not real, I thought. And I don’t think that the audience/contestants did think that it was real, but that did not stop them from behaving as it were.

The midterm elections were a frustrating little exercise, at least the electioneering part of them. “Voters are frustrated” was a common theme, no matter the source of the news. And they have every right to be. The economy is splintering in a novel way, chugging along in one sense, and mired down in the other. And the reforms enacted by the current administration were confusing at best, and easily carved up by the parties injured by the reforms into semantic grenades. Perhaps the furthest distance traveled is that between the Lincoln/Douglas debates and what we have now, expensive television ad campaigns telling you what the American people think or want, which the American people, more often than not, confirm after the fact. If you care not just about issues but how legislation actually affects issues, and I try to, you end up wondering where that went, and then begins giving in and trying to devise counter-acting semantic bombs that push the right emotional buttons that will convince people you never met into agreeing with you without realizing it.

The fifth contestant, the recent mom, had pipes, and she took the stage like she knew what she was doing, leaning back into the high notes, holding the mike like it was part of her. The audience was into it. I still thought the British teen was better. But when recent-mom hit the lyrics:

Let freedom ring
Let the white dove sing
Let the whole world know that today
is a day of reckoning

The audience erupted, standing and whoo-ing, and I knew that the British teen had no chance. And the Mexican restaurant we went to after the show had televisions, but they were all showing SportsCenter.

Brent Cox is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY.