Americans may not have mastered the subtle art of actually understanding politics, examining the voting record and experience of presidential candidates or even researching the views of the contenders, but they sure have managed to figure out ways to make the election season less boring… and quite frankly much more classless.  I look at the video below, and my first thought is, “Holy blazing fuck!  The decline of the American civilization is complete.  Please pack up your shit, hang on to the towel bar in your bathroom and get ready for Armageddon.  It’s over.  The next world superpower is on the rise, and it will be Micronesia.

Meanwhile, CNN must have been having a slow news day… Or maybe they actually know about the impending Armageddon and want to extend news coverage to the only creatures that will actually survive it.

http://www.cnn.com/video/savp/evp/?loc=dom&vid=/video/politics/2008/08/22/nj.pres.cockroach.race.news12newjersey

I’ll tell you guys a secret.  I HATE cockroaches!  To me, they are truly a piece of hell on earth, and if there’s anything that would make me believe in that dark, dank, underground place, it is the presence of these creatures. 

When my parents and I first came to the United States, we weren’t exactly rolling around in dough.  My dad was a electrical engineer, who went to work as a dishwasher until he learned enough English to get an engineering gig.  My mom was an engineer designer, who wasn’t much better off.  So we lived in one of the grossest places you can possibly imagine – an apartment in Brooklyn, NY that was tiny, dank and filled with… yeah… roaches.  The foulness and sheer numbers of these things cannot be described to provide you with an adequate visual image of the sheer horror.  I’m assuming (I don’t know for sure) that my parents reported the infestation to the building management, but it was an old building, and there was nothing to be done.

Once, I woke up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water.  I walked to the kitchen in the darkness, with bare feet, and as I put my hand on the light switch in the kitchen to turn on the light, I felt them…. what seemed like thousands of little, repulsive legs scampering all over the place, including my hand!!!  I switched on the lights, and I saw them.  They were horrid, and they were EVERYWHERE!  It was like hell spawned thousands of little lieutenants to terrorize me in the middle of the night!  They scampered at first sign of light, like politicians at the first sign of a polygraph, but it didn’t matter.  I knew they were there.  I wasn’t sure whether to vomit or scream, so I ran instead.  I ran back to my room (after shaking my hands and jumping around to make sure that none of the bugs had taken residence on my clothing), jumped in my bed, and put the covers over my head.  I was terrified.

Once my parents learned enough English to get engineering jobs, we moved to Philadelphia, to a nice, clean apartment.  But even then, I was traumatized.  I was scared to go to the kitchen once it got dark, kept the lights on as much as I could and freaked out at any bug that appeared in the apartment.  To this day, I hyperventilate at the site of bugs, and the thought of cockroaches absolutely sends me into panicky hysterics.

Needless to say, the video above didn’t do anything to calm my fears.  But I do have to say that considering it’s election season, the idea of cockroaches as politicians isn’t exactly inaccurate.