Electioneering ("I trust I can rely on...your vote"

It's election day today. This campaign must be the strangest in living memory-It has got all the absurdities and surreal humour that you would expect from a Woody Allen film whilst also being almost entirely incoherent- even though the candidates repeat everything so often that after a while find yourself mumbling Michael Howard’s tax proposals in your sleep. (needless to say you wake up screaming)
For starters, it is almost impossible to tell the parties apart. The Iraq issue is the only one that clearly splits them- Labour and the Conservatives both supported the war, while the Liberal democrats rejected it. On everything else, it is hard to believe this isn’t some kind of joke that we haven’t caught on to yet. When the Conservative party suddenly comes out warning about the collapse of the asylum system and what they intend to do about it, Labour comes out and parrots identical proposals. When one party talks tough on crime, the other rapidly follows suit. From hospitals to taxes, its all of the same. Lead, i'll follow. Move your feet. That's it. Twirl me around.
What’s really amazing however is how incoherent all the candidates sound- whether its Blair, Howard or Kennedy listening to any of them for more than two minutes is not advisable unless you have a steady supply of aspirin. All of them are determined to make everything sound as complicated and convoluted as possible and they certainly do a good job of it. This is not something that’s confined to the leaders of the parties- all the Party minions are parroting their leaders lines and ensuring that the culture of-how do I put this delicately- ‘bullshit’ continues to thrive right till election day. All the other normal people in the country are looking at each other wondering what on earth is going on. Are we all stuck in some kind of surreal dream? Does it come with good coffee at least?
Their incoherence aside, all of the men running for Prime Minister are just plain bad. It’s a choose-the-lesser-devil kind of situation, only here it is almost impossible to tell who is the lesser evil. None of them are making things any better by running campaigns so vicious and negative that it’s hard to watch without cringing. The result of all this is that people are going to stay home in large numbers on voting day resulting in a victory of what people have jokingly called ‘The Apathy party’. The country is so thoroughly disgusted and bored by the whole thing that many will not vote unless the police go from door-to-door with cattle prods to get them off the couch and such a move has too many human rights implications to be feasible. Some people think this is a sad reflection of how far this once mighty democracy has fallen. Others think the whole thing is just very funny. Your point of view probably depends on how cynical you are. I personally find it hilarious how bad this election is getting. Infact it is so bad that its almost impossible to parody it. This is an election after all where one of the candidates (Howard) is commonly depicted as a vampire (it’s a long story) another as a bumbling drunk (Kennedy) and another as a war-mongering ass-kissing poodle to George Bush (Blair). None of the caricatures are really fair- except maybe Howard who is one of the creepiest men I’ve ever seen in my life and I’ve only seen him on TV- but they stick.
So in a few days, everything will be over and we can all go back to our lives. The only guarantee is that most of the country will have stopped caring long before the last vote has been cast. Look for the apathy party to win.