Eye of the Needle of Public Opinion

These thoughts are better suited consigned to Twitter or Facebook, but 140 characters isn't sufficient. Normal qualifiers "in my social circle and in media portrayals I have experienced, contemporary and outdated" apply throughought.
The Hank Johnson curfuffle is embarrasing. Not because I am embarassed for him, but because I am embarassed of the social reaction. Obviously, what he says made no sense, even as a last ditch effort to address the infrastructural consequences of an increased military presence on Guam. But, really, the guy is human. Touting 'Bushisms' and the like as evidence of clinical idiocy is cruel and somewhat hypocritical.
We loudly recoil at the barter of our privacy for social networking perks. Polititians and celebrities survive under actual Orwellian surveillence. How else are the Hot/Not issues of Stars populated? My, incorrect, first reaction involved wondering if people expect their representatives to be perfect and are righteously angry that they aren't.
The support polls indicate the opposite, of course. Americans despise their representatives. More likely, they are pessimistic about the electees and relish the opportunity to hold up the evidence of unfit qualities. Really, Nicholas? This guy is fit? Bush Jr was fit? Perhaps he is a fine member on the Armed Services Committee or an anchor they couldn't tie to anything else. I simply consider it bad form to let this moment totally define my judgment about his fitness as a representative citizen. How couldn't it be? There was no story previously outside his home territory and he can't have the resources to defuse the PR that this infectious event solicits. Also, it's not prejudice if he actually did it. How intimate must I be to disdain someone? I dearly want to append "in power" to "someone", but the complaint works just fine without it.
I guess this just dredges up the ennui I exposed in the final post of my previous blog. My vote doesn't -statistically- matter in California for president. A bare four representatives between state and federal legislatures also diminishes the likelihood that My Vision of Responsible Government will ever come to pass. Short of changing national opinion about relevant issues, in the guise of a cultural icon. As if change was ever made that way. And no, I will not write you a story where you are the time-traveling Mary Sue inducting a premature Industrial Revolution into the Renaissance.
So, while that post laments, acceptingly, my impact on the bureaucracy, I chafe at how others handle their own doublethink. Who gets elected? Incumbents, corporate patsys, or extremist populists. And then they are subjected to this ahistorical level of nagging. I recall 2008 saw people decrying both candidates for biasing their stump speeches to the local audience, especially at fundraisers. I previously settled on a structuralist interpretation that false hope of 'change' keeps a compromise for the mentioned parties. (I mean voters, political parties, and governmental beneficiaries; not just the political parties.) How can we expect otherwise, how else can a candidate garner votes than to incite (unwarranted) passion?
The pattern of character assassination, of which Johnson is the newest enabler-victim, presents another filter on our political aspirants. You need skin like a battleship to smile and assure everyone that, no I didn't really mean that household proximity to Russia is tantamount to diplomatic experience. I can't see Mr. Smith going to Washington under these conditions. He has easier routes to earn prestige or charitable attention for his community than pour money into advertising for an uncertain victory that merits a single floor vote and perhaps an irrelevant committee post or two. So we get people we don't trust and occasionally people we shouldn't trust.
I was going to trot out machine learning as the utopian solution. One pillar of Scott Adam's party platform involves cowtowing first to our best (scientific) understanding of an issue or, where subjective, to statistical public opinion. But, we don't need a person to enact majority favor. I don't even mean just do what 51% say in one or many polls. The statistic weights built up from years of input could reflect our longer-term preferences. Or not, obvious literary figures have plumbed this depth and found it lacking as are our current AI capabilities.
Further, rehashing the capability of statistical algorithms detracts from the incipent cause of bringing it up. A human, even Adams on a neutral path, will flub some delivery and invite this sword of damoceles into his crown. A software neural network will produce the same answers without opening this chink. Because it will reflect our cultural decisions. It would be us, but only as a static oracle of introspection. Such a system would lack creativity. A perfect civil servant would be inhuman, at minimum in this capacity.
I don't ask that you avoid sharing in a gape mouthed blank stare. It may even be fun. We are Meaning Producing machines. (Superstition as path to Kuhn paradigms.) For example, I like looking at mixotronic. It returns three randomly chosen concepts, ostentibly for an onlooker to create a story or something with it. What would the union of 'machiavellian,' 'seige,' and 'Stranger in a Strange Land' be like? I opined, after a non sequitur commercial in between scenes of Awake, that perhaps a postmodern advertising scheme involves offloading meaning creation to a consumer. And, the work is largely instinctive within a domain of connectivity. So long as the brand is emphasized right alongside, perhaps it may be more effective (via active listening) than relying on celebrity association (or other techniques) to shill your product, as those tropes are easily identified and tuned out. Or maybe not. I hear some people tried to call the FTC on bioware for insufficient narrative hand-holding since Mass Effect 3's final scenes were too 'open ended.'