'tis what kind of a season?

I'm almost looking forward to the political campaigns swinging into high gear. It's the prospect of the onslaught of abrasive nonstop TV ads which brainless glued-to-the-tube morons like me have inflicted on us. It's hard to imagine that I can actually be looking forward to Michele Bachmann spots. You know; the ones in which she contemptuously spits out the mantra of the evils of Obama-care in her very best Minnesota church-basement, nasal whine. I probably should have my head examined.

But I swear that the onslaught of abrasive nonstop Christmas season TV ads from the auto industry has got me on the verge of dreaming of more face time with the likes of the Congresswoman. When you think about it though, the car ads and the Bachmann ads are really cut from just about the same cloth. I doubt that anyone who's bothering to read this needs any additional convincing that she's a truly heinous political boor. Stupid, smug, smarmy, sacrosanct, small-minded, self-important...I could go on. And that's just a few adjectives out of the S section of the dictionary. She is truly the ugly American in ways that Marlon Brando couldn't have come close to bringing to the big screen back in the day.

But the car ads that are making my stomach lurch every morning and have me knocking shit off the kitchen counters in my haste to grab the remote are every bit as ugly and embarrassingly American. Who on God's green earth would seriously be moved to go out and drop something in excess of a middle class annual income on a new holiday Lexus or BMW? Jeez, ya got me. Oh, wait...I know! It's the same heinous boors who are funding Michele Bachmann's run up the flagpole and the same boors who are doing their damnedest to keep anyone with a middle class annual income a permanent part of the lower middle class.

The ideal that these ads paint of a warped, demented, Mercedes-driven American elite is pure fuel for the Occupy crowd. And enough to gag most anyone even a tiny smidge to the left of the GOP boors, louts and oafs who strut their stuff on Capitol Hill these days. Like I said, it's enough to make me wish for grating attack ads from the campaign trail. In those media-bites, you can at least see the actual faces of the ugly Americans instead of the repulsively sanitized models we see in the holiday ads. And this is all the more bitter as the last of the St. Paul Ford Plant workers ponder their futures from the barstools at Tiffany's.

Maybe I'm just feeling a little jaded from too many hours of chasing down used textbooks and checking on an unending supply of just-invented ISBN's attached to textbooks which I will never in a million years chase down as used copies. Maybe I'm jealous that the velvet-collared overcoat crowd can afford new Infinitis (or so we're led to believe) while I can't even afford the cover charge to get onto a dealer's showroom floor to smudge the wax job on one of those damned things.

It must be a seasonal affective thing. I'm even getting tired of hearing Burl Ives's take on Holly Jolly Christmas and Bruce Springsteen's on Santa Claus is Comin'. How un-American is that?

Happy Holidays to all. Count your blessings.