Warren Ellis’ Last Post About the Election
So I wrote this book called Transmetropolitan, set in the US, and partway through there’s a Presidential election between a man nicknamed The Beast and a man nicknamed The Smiler. The thing about The Smiler is that, in the dozen years since I wrote that book, people seem able to map half of all politicians on to him, dependent on their personal politics. Anyway. It’s clearly going to be a close-run election, and that gets even tighter when a huge, freakish storm strikes the biggest city in America.
So you can imagine what my week’s been like.
It was bad enough when Romney’s “47 percent” talk eerily echoed a speech The Beast gave inTransmetropolitan. Now I’m being blamed for a lethal storm striking New York City.
I write this about eight days before voting day. US Presidential politics are a favorite spectator sport of mine, and I’m sad to see the cycle end, even though this one hasn’t really been a good game. President Obama’s fairly grim, toothless, meandering and perfunctory presidency gained excellent contrast from an assemblage of GOP candidates so demented and corrupt that even to describe them as such would be an insult to the many hard-working demented and corrupt politicians extant today. It was an array of desperate, shambling criminals (and Jon Huntsman, who presumably was there on a bet) that may have been unprecedented, even in the stinking cesspool of American politics, in its lunatic evil. The “winner” of the GOP race was always going to be the one who didn’t shit themselves on stage. But the GOP itself couldn’t win, because, considering the bunch running, the best you could hope for was a candidate who didn’t shit themselves on stage.
