Letter From Planet Earth: Republican Primaries

Hey Gzorgax,

Sorry, it’s been ages since my last letter and I hope all is well with you in the Gliese 667 system. These days everyone in my country seems to be really interested in the election happening in Earth’s dominant nation, America. It’s the election before the main election for the US presidency; this secondary election is called the presidential primary election. It’s to see who will battle Barack Obama for symbolic leadership of the executive and actual leadership of the UN.

The contestants are pretty interesting and the guy who’ll probably win has the name Mitt Romney: neither of which are normally names on planet Earth. He’s this dude who’s in a race to look more conservative than all of his rivals. This is an interesting challenge because he’s up against a guy called Newt Gingrich (newt isn’t a name either, it’s a kind of animal with similar physiology to your people) who postures as being the most family-values oriented, anti-elite of the bunch, although he did marry his former high school teacher, suggest an open marriage while divorcing a later wife, has a PhD and is a member of the elite.

There’s another guy called Rick Santorum. Rick is short for Richard, even though Richard is normally shortened to Dick, but I guess that might have been an embarrassing name so he probably thought he was dodging a bullet there. It’s moot anyway as “santorum” has become a byword for a substance that can result from anal sex (kind of like if you stuck your spawning rod in one of your mates’ obverse cloacae). Also, in one memorable incident he took his dead foetus home and had his living offspring play with it.

There’s also Ron Paul, but I think he might be from your planet so maybe you know him already.

This might sound like a strange collection of people to be running for a conservative party nomination and it looks like Romney will win. The thing he’s got going for him is that although he doesn’t play with foetuses, have a PhD, or have a name which, googled, mainly yields results detailing mixtures of sexual lubricant and human faecal matter, he does belong to a fundamentalist religion. I’ve told you about Christianity, well basically Romney’s a Mormon, which is a special kind of Christian that believes the basic tenets of mainstream Christianity are not sufficiently bizarre to test adherents’ faith and so supplements them with stories about magic underwear and the Garden of Eden being in Missouri. The Mormons are at core a group of hard working and self sufficient people who marched into the desert and somehow made a life for themselves in harsh conditions, thriving to the extent that they refused federal aid during the Great Depression. This combination of impressive conscientiousness and astonishing gullibility makes a Mormon the obvious leader of the modern conservative movement.

Anyway, let me know how things are on your planet.

As always, yours earthily,

Jamie.

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