A political test to rival comparing the fictional characters candidates create as novelists . . .
Is Your Candidate Human?
In the film Bladerunner, organic androids called replicants have escaped onto the planet Earth. They are almost exactly the same as human beings.
Have you ever wondered whether or not your political candidates are really human? Well, in San Francisco they wonder about things like that. . .
Is a particular candidate human or an insidious replicant, possessed of physical strength and computational abilities far exceeding our own, but lacking empathy and possibly even bent on our destruction as a species?
Wisely, they chose the only test that can be applied to distinguish a replicant from a human being; namely, the Voight-Kampff empathy test.
They asked the classic list of questions, each looking for an emotional reaction to the implied death of a living animal. My personal favorite candidate’s answer to the question “It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?” His response: I’d look for money.
I’m not sure if they detected a replicant, but I’m pretty sure they detected a politician.
Yes–but have you seen the Michael Steele ads in Maryland? He loves puppies!
Is he a football player? Big shoulders!
And a nice smile, I’ll grant you.
I just really respond to ads with humor. You’d think given the popularity of Jon Stewart and the wildly successful Super Bowl ads of course, that more candidates would pick up on humor for us sophisticated and jaded viewers! Have you seen the Bill Richardson cowboy ad yet? (Maybe it’s linked online somewhere but I saw it on cable.)
Speaking of cuddly animal humor (rabbits and poodles!)in politics. . .
HUMAN and HUMOR come from the same contextual root, don’t they? Makes sense to me that we’d look for them together then, as being healthy for us and our politics:
“The origin of the term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which stated that a mix of fluids known as humours controlled human health and emotion. . .
Both a social etiquette and a certain intelligence can be displayed through forms of wit and sarcasm.Eighteenth-century German author Georg Lichtenberg said that “the more you know humour, the more you become demanding in fineness”.”