Mattopia Jones

I No Longer Believe in Harvey Dent

28 March 2008

This hurts.

I realize this is going "off topic," but it still needs to be shared and, given the timing of the following incident, it fits in with the events leading up to the Cairene trip.

Like I said, this hurts. Bad.

This is an election year and the country has never faced bigger - or more numerous - challenges. Lots of candidates are talking about change and taking back this or that city, or even taking back the entire country and putting it back in the hands of common people.

Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain give their spiel on a national level. At the local level, Harvey Dent has gone from long shot to shooting star, seemingly overnight. Unfortunately, not one of them is really different - that is, not one of them is actually and truly trustworthy.

Hillary's got so much baggage she makes Imelda Marcos' shoe collection look tres petite. I had hope for Obama, but his responses lately have been dicey. McCain? Ditto.

As for all the spin doctors, I now have to turn the channel every time they come on. How can people sleep at night when they live a life so devoid of truth and so full of 24/7 spin? People like Paul Begala and James Carville are so grating because their entire profession revolves around never admitting wrong-doing, pointing the finger elsewhere, and denial, denial, denial.

That's not to single out liberals; those two simply seem to be the most ubiquitous. Conservatives are equally guilty and the non-stop nonsense of both parties pushed me to become a registered independent. It's a shame they are not openly labeled as "spin doctors" when they put their mugs on TV; instead they're described as "political consultants" or "political strategists."

That's B.S. That's P.C. lingo. The entire political structure as it stands currently is nothing more than one big load of B.S. For better or worse, and I tend to believe it's for the better, I am allergic to B.S.

For a while there, I was sucked into the magical air that hangs around Dent. I did believe in Harvey Dent. I did believe we could take back The City. But then things went screwy. Little things. Tiny things. But as we all should know by now, big things have small beginnings.

So on Friday, 21 March, I trundled my butt downtown to show my support for Harvey Dent. Everything was cool. The atmosphere was exciting, buoyed by the anticipation of real change. The swag was all over the place: huuuge, ginormous posters on really nice, heavy card stock; bumper stickers; decals; buttons. Phew.

Well, the couple kids running the Dent Mobile that afternoon were certainly amiable enough. Good conversation about taking back Gotham; they even helped alleviate a very minor concern I had that Dent might, in reality, be two-faced.

Looking back on that now, my gut might actually be right after all.

Those kids took my picture in front of the Dent Mobile and made promises the pictures of me - and so many others - would be loaded onto Dent's site that night or early the next morning.

It never happened.

And now I've got this sickening feeling in my gut of guts that tells me a lot of that air around Dent's campaign was hot. It was this tiny slight that got me thinking a lot of Dent's campaign was nothing more than vaporware. Empty promises.

Sure, he won by a landslide. A surprisingly huge landslide.

But now I'm fighting with some regrets about how I cast my vote on 11 June.

Maybe I should've voted for Dana Worthington.

I guess, in this case, the only certainty is that Roger Garcetti's the real nut case, not the Batman.

For now, I've gotta put this out of my mind. Tomorrow, I'm off to New York, then Amsterdam and Cairo.

---

Late Update:
Here it is, 4 July, and now I'm really confused.

Feeling disillusioned by Dent, I put my hopes back on that Dark Knight character. In a display of community goodwill, his agents were supposed to put his Tumbler and Batpod on display at a local hot spot.

Once again, I trundled my butt over to the designated location after work on 2 July. It was only 18:15 and the "all day" event was apparently already over or merely a charade through and through.

Jeepers. If you can't rely on a vigilante, who can you trust?

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