According to Hofmann: Rock the vote or die naked!
If I learned anything from my high-school civics teacher, it’s that he cannot wait until after the election “when all those stupid political ads are done and over with” — well, that and I learned that one of the three branches of government is…hmm…oak? I think I remember one of them being oak; I think it had something to do with constructing the president’s desk.
Don’t get me wrong, he was a good teacher. He kept it real and spoke from his heart and from the streets, which is what you want in a teacher except someone who teaches heart surgery.
Anyway, my poor civics teacher could not have foreseen the tsunami of political ads that have infested print, TV, radio, billboards, front lawns, web pages, streaming videos and cartons of milk because photos of missing kids don’t pay the rent.
If that wasn’t bad enough, he’d probably throw himself off a ledge after seeing how ridiculous the efforts have become to get people to vote.
First, from what I can remember, there’s “Rock The Vote,” which started in the mid 1990s where the young people were encouraged to vote by celebrities like Aerosmith, Madonna and Donny Osmond appearing in embarrassingly bad public service announcements to get the kids to vote and be “cool” and “rad” and “excellent.”
The movement still survives to this day with new celebrities, but one thing that never changes is the fact that public service announcements are still embarrassingly bad and chalk-full of cringe.
Beginning in 2004, musician Sean Combs (a.k.a. P. Diddy a.k.a Puff Daddy, a.k.a. Puffy, a.k.a. Diddy, a.k.a. Puffy D., a.k.a. PDY, a.k.a. PHD, a.k.a. Artist Formerly Known As P. Diddy, a.k.a. Name TBA) promoted the tagline “Vote or Die” to give voters an edgy feel for carrying out their civic duty while giving people with Generalized Anxiety Disorder something new to worry about.
Least and hopefully last, we have a campaign out this year where celebrities, all of whom I don’t want to see naked, appear naked on camera to instruct people how to properly prepare and seal a mail-in ballot to avoid a “naked” ballot. Yup. That’s the zenith of creativity they’ve accomplished.
“Why thank you, Josh Gad and Amy Schumer. I was just going to read and follow instructions on the mail-in ballot itself, but now I’m blind and will have to vote in person.”
Basically, the idea over the decades has been to portray voting as something cool, something dangerous and something, I guess, sexy?
That is why we have such low voter turnouts because we have idiot celebrities pretty much lying to us over and over and over again.
I’ll be honest with you by saying that voting is an extremely important and powerful civic duty that everyone should exercise, but you have to admit that voting is freaking boring!
I don’t care if it’s behind a curtain or on a computer scree because there’s a thousand other things more exciting to do during your day like watching a snail avoid road salt, you driving to the polls, making a gluten-free doughnut, you driving back from the polls and pretty much anything else.
I would have to imagine anyone who fell for the Rock-The-Vote-or-Die-Naked propaganda, walked away from the polls thinking, “So…that’s it? Maybe the drive back will be exciting.”
While I never fell for any of that, I’ve voted in pretty much every election since I turned 18 and will continue to always vote until the day I die in about two years.
You see, my motivation to vote came from the words of my late father who pretty much told me if I didn’t vote, I’d be a jerk who doesn’t have a right to complain about anything that happens in my country, state and hometown.
Now, I didn’t want to be a jerk, at least in his eyes (but everyone else can just deal with it) and I love to complain about pretty much everything.
So that, my fellow Americans, is why I vote…and put my faith in the mahogany branch of government.
According to Hofmann is written by staff reporter Mark Hofmann of Rostraver Township. His books, “Good Mourning! A Guide to Biting the Big One…and Dying, Too” and “Stupid Brain,” are available on Amazon.com. He co-hosts the “Locally Yours” radio show on WMBS 590 AM every Friday.