LAUGHTER was the Best Medicine

The 80s hair metal band Cinderella had a hit back in the day, entitled “Don’t know what you’ve got (till it’s gone).”

That song was not about the sorry spectacle that was the 2016 election. If they’d been that clairvoyant, Cinderella would have invented grunge.

However, the titular sentiment applies to this election – what a godforsaken freak show it was.

Consider the top of the ticket – the presidential race, i.e. the only thing half the people reading this even cared about.

One side saw the effective coronation of a legacy candidate, helped along by the dummy challenge of Martin O’Malley, whose reasons for running were always obscure at best, and of Bernie Sanders, who went from complaining about crony capitalism and the candidate of Wall Street to capitulating to the Clinton machine, which absorbed him into the Borg with no more or less ceremony than it did the mainstream media, which was so in the tank for her that it should have been counted as an in kind contribution.

The other side saw Trump, aided and abetted by the “winner takes all” primary system the GOP establishment set up to grease the skids for Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Turned out that demagoguery carried the day in winner takes all primaries. It’s as if Trump’s MAGA set responded to personal insults more than it did to policy prescriptions.

Moving down from there, it was an atrocity exhibition the likes of which no one really predicted a year before.

In the senate race, you saw the implosion of “Congressman With Guts” Alan Grayson, who talked a good socialist-lite game but proved to be personally reprehensible and an easy target for Patrick Murphy, the Democratic nominee who may or may not have been a cardboard cutout (because the only time he made it to NE Florida was to fundraise, we will never know).

In the house race in CD 5, we saw the end of the Corrine Brown experience, her long-running act undermined by her (or her inner circle’s) inability to keep its hands out of the One Door for Education till.

Brown’s gone. Glo Smith, the Republican sacrificial lamb, raised barely enough money in her bid for school board, much less congress. 

And Al Lawson? He had a victory party Tuesday night … in Tallahassee. (Notable: you can’t spell Tallahassee without “al.”)

Everyone wanted to kvetch about how corrupt Corrine was, but at least she was here.

State house races? We had issues there, too.

Reggie Fullwood ran for and won his nomination for reelection while under indictment. After he realized that he couldn’t wriggle out of his campaign fraud counts by saying his contributors didn’t care that he spent their money on jewelry and liquor, he pleaded out.

Quintessential Duval hubris there. But it’s not as bad as Jay Fant, the esteemed representative from the Westside, who raised $90K for a campaign against a write-in, then pissed $70K down his leg at the intersection of Park and Edgewood.

Wait, I mean that he spent $70K on an ad buy that ran every five minutes on Fox News for weeks on end. Congrats to the consultants who got him to sign on to that utter waste of money.

And even in the Duval Clerk of Courts race, where the entire media turned apoplectic at the beginning of 2015 about the end to the 140-year-old tradition of courthouse weddings, the media didn’t hold it against Ronnie Fussell. The T-U endorsed him, as did Corrine Brown in her quick picks.

Amidst this dispiriting backdrop, there was one candidate who defined the cycle for me: Daniel Murphy, a write-in running for congress against John Rutherford.

Murphy’s campaign budget: $100.

I caught Murphy’s act at a debate in October against Gary Koniz (a guy prone to writing 5,000 word screeds to local politicians, characterized by conspiracy theories and weird capitalizations) and Democrat Dave Bruderly, who wanted to be taken seriously as a real threat to Rutherford, but didn’t bother with campaign infrastructure.

Murphy’s closing remarks were of interest, as they essentially were an 80s-style standup routine, explaining how his plan to “make America laugh again” would “bring our country together again.”

“Give me laughter, or give me death. Preferably laughter,” Murphy said.

We know we don’t control our elections. The prison industry, big pharma, hundreds of lobbying groups – they own some of us, rent others, and have earmarked the rest for demolition and redevelopment.

Murphy’s approach, financed on less money than it costs to have dinner at Ruth’s Chris, was the best commentary this year on the corrupt, remote and depressing system by which our country is run, our currency is debased, and our prospects rendered bleaker with each passing year.

Make America Laugh Again? Hell yes. Because it’s easier than crying.

It’s also less dehydrating – an important consideration in the water wars to come.