Bring on Nov. 6

There are certain things that simply aren’t done.

Despite the constant flux in society — changing mores, legalized weed, our lives an open electronic book — there are some behaviors and actions that remain unacceptable.

For instance, during prayer time at church, you don’t ask the congregation to pray for healing for your monstrous hangover from pounding tequila the night before. You don’t put a large car top carrier on your ride, then try to enter a parking garage. The particular desecration, the abomination, the violation of sacred space, of which I speak, relates to the most sensitive of personal issues.

Football.

The consolation for the end of summer is football. NFL, college, local high school football — I love it all. Monday Night Football, in my estimation, salvaged Mondays from the work/life scrap heap. What is better after a beautiful fall day of hauling firewood than a contentious shootout between great teams?

I accept that there will be commercials during games. They have to pay the bills, especially when the quarterback is making $50 million a year. I am generally doing something else when watching football, such as writing this, or sanding a table, so ads for shaving cream, insanely expensive drugs, or even adult diapers don’t phase me.

But in my home, in my comfy chair, gazing lovingly at my OLED 77-inch, comes the intruder, the defiler, the blasphemer.

Political ads.

I counted eight consecutive ads for the Montana Senate race during one timeout during a recent game. No astute policy observation, no cogent argument for fiscal sobriety, no recognition of the complexities facing a pluralistic society.

Nope. I can summarize all the commercials. My opponent is a truly horrible, greedy, selfish, ignorant opportunist who is out to ruin your life. He/she/they/them hates America, babies, puppies, your mother and anything else that would require a good day’s work.

And over and over again. The same ad ran ten times during the same game. The same images of the dastardly candidate looking creepy or fat or generally demented.

All of this during a football game, when seasons are short enough that two thirds of the games are polluted by a political discourse that belongs not on a television screen but in a drain field.

So can political ads be banned during football games? The pious First Amendment crowd would say no, of course, that is preventing free speech. But advertising for cigarettes was banned, and I am far more likely to die of a stroke from watching one more accusation that the candidate wants all Montana grizzly bears speaking Chinese than I am from smoking. I don’t need to be informed about all those Canadians pouring across the border, so that our children will grow up eating poutine and talking funny.

What is to be done? Is the selection of our political representatives really decided by this asinine video backwash? Do we listen to it? Does it change how we vote?

We don’t want to know the answer to those questions. It would be like visiting a psychological hot dog factory. But we can agree that something so essential, so vital to the national character (football), should not be diminished by the tawdry and trivial (politics).

Bring on Nov. 6.