I don’t particularly want to spend a lot of energy writing about the Republican primaries and debates this semester, so might as well get most of it out right now.
   
 I’ve never considered myself religious, but a limited Catholic upbringing instilled a certain empathy with people who were. Religion, on many levels, is something probably felt at least as much as it is thought about, and politics kind of fills that void for me — people need to feel, after all. Yes, I’m saying that, amidst overwhelming self-control and relativity in the spirit of objective speculation, politics is the cultural construct I allow myself to sometimes feel strongly about as much as I think I know about it. Because just try to apply total relativity and raw realism to absolutely every aspect of your life and see how quickly it takes you to have a panic attack, or just fall into a deep depression.
    
The deliberate struggle for objectivity at the expense of the baser instinct to be unconditionally correct is very satisfying, and the world would be unrecognizably better if this were a more widely learned attitude in the face of the endless warring of stupidly co-dependent ideologies and dualities. But sometimes you just need to let go and get enthusiastic about something part of you knows is cursed with the ridiculousness of your species.
    
But at the same time, what could fit the description of something so obviously co-dependent better than our two-party system — to the point that one party could not be well defined completely stand-alone without pressure from the other? These realities are interesting because people probably couldn’t bring themselves to be so ideologically dependent on something so flawed, but it’s these flaws and inconsistencies in the context of your own political interests that can energize the most apathetic and disillusioned among us. I don’t even think most people consciously ally themselves with one of the two parties anymore, and rely instead on more individualized, practical platforms instead of macroeconomics or foreign policy.
    
But then the Republican primaries come along, and the candidates for our highest office regularly abandon whole chunks of their party’s most basic tenets simply to gain the fleeting leverage against some vague accusation in a so-called debate. And it keeps getting worse. I’ve had no choice but to temporarily adopt the boring better-than-politics stance because of the stress these people cause me when they say things.
   
 I think relativity is fine to slip in here and there for effect when talking about important issues just as a general reminder of the nature of the system one is participating in; the self-awareness gained by the deconstruction of a system given so much emotional validity by animals who require these constructs for consistency and structure can be just what’s needed to get a point across that would be otherwise bogged down in an ideological tug-of-war. But the Republican candidates seem to being doing a great job of making the most complacent politicos uncomfortably self-aware of how theatrical this process has really become, and how embarrassing these debates really are for us all.
    
Republicans have it extra hard these days, it seems. What unifies them save the guaranteed force of everyone who thinks Obama is a failure? I would remark that at least war is still a unifying principle for these guys, minus Ron Paul, but how can they mean that when Obama has seen the Iraq war through to the bitter end, staying until the very day the Bush Administration recommended, and in general enjoying the full precedent of the out-of-control Bush foreign policy? They squabble over who would have fewer scruples about automatically attacking Iran at the first sign of nuclear maturity and Rick Perry says he’d send troops back to Iraq. Sounds like satiating the bloodlust of mob rule.
    
The Republican candidates may not be keeping democracy honest, consistent, remotely intelligent, professional, substantial or appealing, but at least they’re keeping it, in a country where a little over half the people even vote for the president. Who could honestly blame “them” for just kind of, well, taking the hint, and calling the whole thing off? I don’t like to think that this kind of overdone, childish, dramatic, back and forth is required to keep people interested in, nay, acknowledging our form of government and the possibility that it might play a role in our culture. Falling below the 50 percent democratic participation line might be scarily close to reality, but I’m not sure even that would shock it into conducting more mature debates.


— Wiley Robinson is an undecided junior. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.