...and I feel fine.

People, horrified by whatever the latest turn of the 2016 election is, claim they simply can't pay attention to media coverage anymore lest they clutch their pearls so tightly they choke. But the same people, according to this radio piece, have apparently also stopped going to the movies and watching TV, and have even foregone football (heavens!) for the sake of the real-life drama of “forcible grabbing, groping, small hands and tongue gymnastics in the current presidential election” (not sure what that last one's about TBH). And, so the argument went, the reason they're doing so is to sate their addiction to "junk entertainment."

This claim was in my head this morning – the first non-urgent morning I've had for a while, so I lingered over the news longer than usual. Well after confirming there were no recent earth-shattering developments, I still kept refreshing the feeds on both my laptop and phone, radio on in the background, and only when the same stories kept popping up over and over did I finally realize why. Yes, I was indeed looking for a story that the Republican party's 2016 presidential nominee had insulted a cancer patient, or stolen Halloween candy from some straight white girl in the suburbs, or had disemboweled and eaten a golden retriever. But not out of prurience (at least I don't think so, though maybe, as Scott Simon said, I'm only “eager to say what sounds high-minded”). I just wanted reassurance. Not that any of those possibilities would discourage his supporters at this point, but the constant refreshing is the only thing I can do to flush something down the intertubes that tells me this contest cannot happen, that the bald, fluorescent, fragile-egoed F*ckface von Clownstick cannot be trailing the next president within the polling margin of error.

So it's not that people don't want to look away from the election. We're just superstitious, and don't dare.