It is that time of the year once again. It is time for a spectacle of both boring and annoying proportions. Tonight, the President of the United States will be delivering the annual State of the Union address, and one of the world’s most dull and predictable plays will be carried out across all major television networks. Honestly, I think the American people would rather just watch whatever television shows were taken off air in order to show this waste of time. It’s like some bizarrely annoying, choreographed figure-skating routine where no one really knows how to skate. And it’s not even time for the Olympics yet.
Each year, the President stands before both houses of Congress, as well as the cabinet and whatever Supreme Court justices decide they will attend, and then a well-rehearsed event takes place. The President lays claim to some obvious accomplishment for which he is likely not responsible and that he knows his supporters will love, then all the Republicans cheer loudly. At the same time, all the Democrats boo and jeer and pretend to be considerably offended. The justices look on stoically, trying to do their best not to show any sign of engagement with what’s going on, as commentators look on and make hay with so much as a shift in eye movement from one of the justices.
Trump could say that under his tenure of just one year as President, he helped to increase the birth rate of penguins in Antarctica just by giving a tax decrease, and all the Republicans would cheer and shout, the Democrats would boo, and the commentators would quickly Google penguins to wonder aloud at how the President’s tax cuts may have caused people to starve; thus increasing the food supply for the penguins. Then they would quickly notice that Justice Clarence Thomas might have disagreed with the President because he looked as though he may have farted.
Granted, the State of the Union is a tradition that is very loosely interpreted from a sentence or two written into the Constitution, but the overacting, boring, and annoying event it has become is something of a truly worthless endeavor. It’s very rare that we learn anything new from the address, and its stated purpose of informing the legislature of the state of affairs in the country is absurd; as if congressmen and senators have no access to information. Instead, it’s just a way for politicians to puff out their chests, claim victory for the President in whatever claims he wants to make, and an effort for politicians to try and show the country that there are two parties with deep divides in philosophy and that we all made a mistake in selecting someone from the wrong party or that we made the right choice in selecting the right party. Wrong. We all made a bad choice in selecting every one of them, and both parties want similar things in the end – just in different flavors.
I know all of this is sort of like watching a TV series that went bad after the fourth episode, but you just have to watch the next episode to see what happened, because you’re curious. Most of you reading this agree with me on this, but you will watch anyway (and sadly, I will probably find myself watching a little bit too). So, I will cut myself a little shorter on this writing than I normally would in my best efforts to save your attention span for some of that silliness to be presented tonight. Best of luck in finding anything interesting about it.
Danny Chabino
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