It's hard to be a good American when you're living in Japan. There are things you inevitably miss, like daily interactions with people who ask you how much you bench, bro, and eventually you end up half-American, knowing that Lady Gaga is a singer but not knowing any of her songs or who her favorite politician is. And I don't watch CNN or MSNBC or FOX, not even accidentally at the dentist's office, so for the past several years I've been getting my news via the written word and therefore assuming that this Obama and this Romney were nicknames for the same person, since they both favor the same war on everything policies and get caught being full of exactly the same kind of shit literally all the time. Both their names rhyme with bomb. What were the chances? I figured it was something Bush came up with.
But the other day I came across a picture of this Obama next to a picture of this Romney and though they look pretty much the same -- in a word, or a couple of them, like rich dicks -- I noticed a difference I suppose is worth considering. The one wears his tightly curling hair closely trimmed while the other reps a hundred dollar hey look at my hair Ivy douche look. This is when I realized I had failed miserably in my admittedly half-assed text-based attempts to be a decent American citizen -- something that, in my defense, is very hard to do when you're not watching TV at least two hours a day -- and I decided to print out a picture of each of the candidates for 2013-2017 bomber-in-chief, place these lovingly in frames enspattered with corporate logos and, from now until the election, inspect them for at least 30 minutes a day in the hopes of advancing my understanding of politics to at least the point where I can enter the 4th quintile of Americans who care about democracy.
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