Bear Vasquez, who posted a video to YouTube last year of a double rainbow and him being very excited about it, had it get some 29 million hits and was invited onto the Jimmy Kimmel show to talk about it, is thinking about running for president.
It's a more coherent political statement than that Republican guy riding his motorcycle out in the desert
Well, why the hell not? He looks like a crazy old hippie (the kind of guy I’d like to smoke a joint with) and he sounds like he has some pretty interesting ideas. Of course, he lives in a trailer out in the wilderness, so he may be a bit out of touch with the average voter, but I’ve heard worse platforms than rainbows and alternative energy.
Every year, there are large numbers of candidates on the ballot who stand no chance at all. Yet they run. The news media generally ignores them and the miniscule percentage of votes they get does not affect the outcome at all (Nader was an exception).
I remember about 15 or 20 years ago we were on a road trip from L.A. to Las Vegas – me, my somewhat eccentric but very likeable roommate Dennis, and Dennis’ Jared Loughneresque teenage son – when we picked up a hitchhiker. Skinny old guy, seemed like a harmless sort. Well, it turned out, he was a candidate for president – not just that year, but every election year. I don’t remember the name of the party, but he didn’t believe in money, something about currency being illegal because some president who’d passed some law back in the 1830s or so wasn’t legally an American citizen or something convoluted like that.
We drove him to Vegas, bought him a couple of meals, even paid his ticket for a roller coaster ride in the Casino at State Line, and never saw him again. Don’t remember his name. Probably didn’t remember it the next day. He never became president.
Things may be changing, though. Vasquez is working through a Facebook app called Votocracy, and the aim of that is to get at least one Facebook candidate on the ballot, which strikes me as a pretty stupid goal, since not all of the people on Facebook are good people, but just because it’s a bad idea doesn’t mean it won’t work.
Some day, presidential candidates will be chosen in a reality TV style format. And we probably won’t be any worse off than we are currently.
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