Tonight is Super Tuesday and I suppose I'll spend most of the evening in front of the box watching the primary elections unfold. I don't even know why I bother, my vote has already been cast, and since I live in Florida it won't count. I'm happy the process exists, even with its pointless and baroque complexities. I know full well the alternative would be dreadful; but I still have some difficulty working up any enthusiasm for it. It all seems so remote, so external to my day to day life. Sure, the results will have a great effect on me, but I have practically no effect on the outcome.

The press is having it's usual feeding frenzy over this lucrative sideshow (just in time to mitigate the financial effects of the writer's strike!), endless analysis and punditry, but it seems much more concerned about the mechanics and details of the whole exercise, not its meaning. It's a horse race, a sporting event, and does it really matter how it turns out? I'm starting to wonder if the real purpose of the political process is just to inject some randomness and uncertainty into selecting our leaders, just a mechanism to substitute for naked power and raw violence. Not that there isn't a lot of that going on, but only at higher, more abstract, and less obvious levels. Perhaps the electoral process just disguises the power and violence. Still, a series of lotteries would probably produce the same result.

A friend of mine who works on the Beltway once described politics as "professional wrestling for college graduates". It does appear to be an intricate tag-team Texas Death Match where everyone wears masks and Spandex and grunts and groans with exaggerated ferocity. Or as Sting once described politicians: "They all look like game show hosts to me." And I can't escape the thought that these people, and those who play the game from the sidelines, are the same clowns who ran for Student Council in high school. Most of the power brokers and chattering classes started off as either businessmen or lawyers, agenda-driven careerists with surgically implanted smiles and handshakes. I stare into their faces and they talk to me as if I were Everyman. I'm not, and neither are they. So why should I believe anything they say? Do they?

Thucydides once described the politics of the Greek city-states as a constant tension between the rabble and the oligarchy. Not much has changed, I suppose, not even Persia waiting in the wings.