It isn't every day that you find yourself facing death by a file cabinet, or that you become entrenched in a toy so seductive your entire research team stalls their work to participate or that you realize maybe, just maybe, morality has nothing to do with morals.


Let me explain.

First, I did nearly die by the hand of a file cabinet...or, I should say, the woman who moved it. In a building not far from where I work the file cabinets are held together on tracks that enable them to roll back and forth and fit together until they lock snugly into a solid mass and a hallway is revealed on the opposite side. Since she didn't hear me (or did she?) as I sifted through files at the farthest end of the contrived hallway, she began moving the large, industrial-sized file cabinets to lock into place. Without noticing it, I found myself feeling vaguely as if I had fallen into a trash compactor. I tried pushing against the imposing wall of files but my weight did nothing. I finally remembered to yelp. The poor woman was frightened out of her wits.

"I nearly smashed you to death! You're so small they wouldn't have even noticed!" I wasn't sure if that was an observation or an accusation, or who, exactly “they” were (the clean up crew?) but either way I was too stunned to say anything. I suddenly felt tragically insignificant.

I could have been smashed to death in between these large cabinets and no one would have noticed. Interesting. I thought.

Upon returning to my office, I found that my two fellow researchers had tried to perfect their skills on a computer toy called "Line Rider". This is probably the most impressive thing I've ever seen on the internet. For those of you who can't get it to load, you basically use a draw tool to make a line and then press play. It takes great skill and perseverance to make an adequate, ride-able, and still impressive little roller coaster for Line Rider. This skill takes time. This time diminishes your productivity. This lack of productivity....well....it could lead to the land of unemployment. But for the moment, we simply use it as a tension-reliever.

And what do I mean that morality may have little to do with morals? I'm not quite sure, but allow me to explore for a moment.

Both Republicans and Democrats in Washington are commenting on the depth and veracity of the negative ad campaigns launched to precipitate the upcoming Congressional elections. Both sides are mercilessly attacking the other with dirt on their candidates they managed to drudge up from before the candidates had even finished puberty.

Both sides justify it by saying that voters ought to know who the candidates really are, and what those candidates are likely to do once they reach Washington.

The premise for both sides is that voters want honest, moral, upstanding individuals running their Congress. Certainly this is the case--we do want our representatives to be trustworthy individuals. But what about the issues themselves? Are we not also concerned with those? And why are they not the primary subjects of the ad campaigns? Don’t we want individuals who will represent our perspective on a given spectrum of issues? Or do we really care if they paid all of their parking tickets all of the time?

Recent ad campaigns against California Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger say nothing of what the Governor plans to do or has done. It simply associates him with George W. Bush. The reasoning goes that if California voters dislike Bush, they won't vote for Schwarzenegger. The end. No discussion about the issues or the differences between what Bush believes to be of importance and what Schwarzenegger says is important, or worse, even what voters believe to be important.

John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat, has had to spend days explaining editorials he wrote for student newspapers. Student newspapers. What does that have to do with current issues? So he wrote about legalizing marijuana when he was a student---does anyone honestly think he’s going to get that passed in Congress or that he even thinks the same way so many years later?

From the outset, it looks as though our elected representatives will only be individuals who say the right cues, have name recognition, or who somehow manage immunity to idiot-proof smear campaigns. They campaigns scream:

"If you don't know to whom you are loyal (and we're certain that you don't) --let us decide for you based on what we drudged up from the depths.” Then, in huge bold letters, “if you vote for this person, you will vote for a lying cheating, no-good, forflushin' (thank you National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation) mindless, stinkin' , stupid...etc.etc'"

These slander campaigns have resulted in the issues becoming bumper stickers or simplified moral-language-laden quips. Congressional elections are no longer about what is the most responsible and feasible approach to taxes, or what are the causes and consequences of real poverty, or what is a realistic, rational as well as diplomatic approach to foreign policy. It isn't even a discussion of the power plays in Washington.

They seem to becoming more and more about duping voters into being angry at someone and then voting for the other side. And then, when this is all said and done, we howl that the decisions we should have made via our representatives in Congress are being made, instead, in the Judiciary or in the Executive branch.

And why do file cabinets and Line Rider and morals not being moral have anything to do with one another let alone Congressional elections?

Because I didn’t make any noise the file cabinets slid silently close to nearly smashing the life out of me. Because we like little mindless games that keep us preoccupied with tiny, insignificant details, we get sidetracked from more important issues.

Because we listen to ad campaigns, the individuals attempting to serve the country become pawns in a big game of tar and feathers that completely sidesteps really important issues. Because we don't speak up about it, or get involved, until after the fact when we can post a snide bumper sticker on our car to exempt us from being responsible for the state of national calamity and because we don’t really have time to learn about those issues, care about them, and think outside of ideological boxes that force us for or against individuals, we make the concept of “morals” nothing more than a slogan. We subscribe to television networks, not ideas. We subscribe to the perspective of narrow-minded ideological pundits, not values. We allow slander to describe for us what are and what should be, in the national conscience, "moral". Politics in the U.S is being smashed between two silent filing cabinets while the rest of us are hypnotized by tiny, mindless details.