The horror(s)!

(via Jay Lake's link salad) Apex is having a flash contest for Halloween. They don't call it flash, but shorts under 1000 words, to me, are flash. Anyway, the theme (imagine me as the teacher from A Christmas Story, "I want you to write a theme.") is ELECTION HORROR. Oo, scary.

I'm assuming here that they don't want the horror that John McCain is selling that if Obama is elected he'll tax us until our eyeballs fall out and there will be roving gangs of "radical Pro-Choicers" roaming the land (I just heard that term last night and I'm still trying to figure out what it means, other than the standard verbal gymnastics the far right engages in, I mean, are there gangs out there grabbing women off the streets and performing abortions on them even if they're not pregnant?). I'm also assuming they don't mean the horror of John McCain being President and either going off the deep end or being a real Manchurian Candidate (and you probably couldn't do that in under 1000 words anyway). Nor the whisper campaign that Obama is the anti-Christ (no, really, it's out there, ever wonder why the McCain ads feature people chanting "Obama" and playing up the whole "world celebrity" thing, yeah, plays to that whisper campaign).

There's plenty of horror to be found in elections (ad campaigns in the week leading up to the elections, I shudder just thinking about it). There's the election booth horrors (25 initiatives! But I need to get to work in an hour). Horrors of elections booths, the cramped cloying closeness behind the curtain, the pulling of levers (well, here in Ohio we get glorified folding tables with privacy screens reminiscent of those panels during Final Jeopardy). There's the multiple signing of names to big registers (care to sign in blood, Mr. Buchheit?) after declaring allegiance (and knowing the politics of your registrar is the exact opposite, benefit of the small town). There's who you vote for (how many of you have actually met these people in the flesh), what you vote on, where you vote (oh, more basement horror), the mind control techniques of political advertising where running a "clean campaign" is an attack ad of it's own. And then there are the unique horrors of being in an election. There's just so much material here, but you only have until October 15th to get it done and submitted.

What to choose, what to choose. Just remember when elections get weird, the weird get elected.