SIGN OF THE TIMES
On my early morning bicycle ride I found fresh graffiti on a bridge pylon under the freeway in Mission Valley. Is it possible that Hermann Rorschach is alive and well and is checking my personality characteristics and emotional functioning with his famous test? Or perhaps it’s just that today’s date is close enough to the first Tuesday in November for me to begin seeing confused elephants all over the place.

Television advertising by both major political parties has begun already with unprecedented ferocity. Republicans are spending millions of dollars to scare us to death, and Democrats are spending millions to tell us that Republicans are trying to scare us to death. Neither group seems to be seeking moral high ground, so we’ll probably see meaner and meaner misleading ads from both sides until the day of the election.

Will we ever see a day when good people, candidates of integrity, speak to us honestly about what should be done and what they will do if they are elected? For now, however, actors are hired to pretend in front of cameras to be experts who tell us exactly how we can get relief. Ads for hemorrhoid remedies are obviously held to a higher standard of verifiable truth than the law requires of paid promotions of political candidates. It's harder to get rid of a pain in the ass in high office than it is to get relief from a case of piles.