So a friend asked, as a guy, what kind of messages are the political candidates sending him.

He can understand if nonheterosexual men are receiving “love letters” from male political candidates, even those that are unintentional/subliminal.

But my friend is a heterosexual male contemplating a vote for what he assumes is a slate of heterosexual men running for U.S. President, including the incumbent/sitting man on the White House Throne.

He never exchanged notes with guys in grade school that he exchanged with girls — the typical:

“Do you like me?  __Yes __ No
If you like me, do you love me? __ Yes __ No
If you love me, will you go out with me?  __ Yes __ No
If you don’t like or love me, will you go out with me anyway? __ Yes __ No
If you won’t go out with me, will you tell your friend Tiffany that I think she’s cute.  __ Yes __ No  __ Who are you, again?”

So, he wonders, if, like me, his guy friends were all about drawing scale models and interiour cutouts of ships and submarines as little kids and then dissing on girls, sports and maybe school subjects as they got older, how are the political candidates trying to reach out to him as he reaches voting age?

Well, candidates, what do you think?

What promises are you making to the 18-to-21 year young potential voters, voters who may be your champions for life?

When I was 18, I exercised my right to vote for political candidates, which included Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, John Anderson and a few other choices for U.S. President.

I grew up in a family where my father was a gun-toting member of the NRA and nonunion, my mother was a sharpshooter herself but a card-carrying member of the teachers’ union.  He was a staunch Republican and she just as strong a Democrat, although at the local political level they voted mainly for the candidate and not just the party ideology.

I looked at the two main presidential candidates, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, who pretty much touted their party platform, including planks that showed firm roots in the extreme version of the party’s main ideology, with plenty for noncommitted voters to consider.

Neither one appealed to me.  Me, an 18-year old kid about to enter college on a 4-year Navy ROTC scholarship that honoured my male lineage of service to the military, voluntary and/or drafted.

Me, who was an upstanding citizen of my community because he knew how to keep his good (i.e., law-abiding) friends separated from his bad (i.e., troublemaking) friends, with neither telling the other about my friendship with them, or our habits — one of the advantages of having secondary school cliques with their imaginary boundaries that few talked about crossing, although many did and still do.

I wasn’t interested in the labels that either the Republican or Democrat candidate wanted to attach to its young voters, both who basically said, “You independents vote for me and together we can speak as one voice, wearing the same label,” which contradicted the whole idea of I-follow-no-one independence.

So I ended up voting for John Anderson, mainly as a protest vote against conformism.

Which led me to question why I was joining the U.S. Navy and its training me to be a good order-following/dictating officer after four or five years, but that’s another story to be told.

Well, my friend, what are you hearing from the candidates?

After 32 years of listening to candidates ask for my vote, I’ve stopped listening to them and started analysing what exactly they can do for me in reality, not in some fictional world portrayed in a brochure or 30-second advert.

I look at their social network, who they can bring into the political arena and who’s already in the arena they can make friends with, the business deals they’ve made, if any, and their personal will-to-power that every great candidate must carry, including strong selfish exhibitionist tendencies, to serve the political office well.

If they continually fall back on dogma to defend themselves, including religion or other emotion-based gobbledygook, then I tend not to take them seriously.

I don’t plan to fall in love with, have fantasies about and then imagine I’ll marry a candidate, which some middle-of-the-roaders seemed to think when they first saw Sarah Palin.

I want facts, not hope.  I want action, not dreams.

If I had my druthers, politics would be less significant than it has become in our current polarised, binary, votebuying world, but history has a way of repeating itself, repeating itself, repeating itself.

Listen to the candidates, if you want, and let the subliminal hints of “Vote for me and I promise to like you, maybe even love you, in whatever way you deem appropriate,” wash over you like good advertising-driven campaigns should, turning candidates into a hodgepodge of parent/friend/lover/counselor/sage/god.

I suggest you ignore the messages altogether and analyse the candidate’s ability to get the job done.  Everything else is just a thin coat of veneer that’ll scrape off at the first sign of abrasive trouble that every U.S. President faces as soon as the protective honeymoon phase washes away.

Or you can simply ignore the whole thing, spending Election Day with friends and lovers, far away from the hocus-pocus magic that politics pretends to be, and focus on what makes you special, including any skills/talents you want to share with the world that you don’t need politics to enable you to become/be the person in this moment that’ll make moments to come more fun, relaxing and enhancing the world around you.