Finally: A distraction of Olympic proportion

Thank God for the Summer Olympics. They have never come at a better time.

What could possibly be a better prescription for our tired, election-fried nation than spending a couple weeks obsessed with beach volleyball, pole vaulting and the modern pentathlon? Absolutely nothing. If I could spend all two weeks doing nothing but watching Olympic sports, I would.

The Olympics this year are a heaven-sent opportunity to indulge in distraction and moral uplift, both of which we desperately need. So go ahead and indulge.

In this modern age, we are a media-soaked people, with big screens on our walls and tiny screens in our paws. Personally, I think this will drive our species to robotic despondence in a few short decades, but that’s another story. Right now, we are drowning from a multimedia hose spraying constant updates of this dreadful, demoralizing election. We deserve a break today and the easiest way to get it is to massively change the channel.

What would happen if we, the voters, took our eyes off this two-year marketing marathon for two weeks? Nothing. If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, it still falls. Or something like that. Whatever.

Maybe Donald Trump will do something way crazier than he’s ever done before. That’s very possible, but so what? If he does pull off something so mega-yuuuge, we’ll have plenty time to ponder it after the last gold medal is awarded.

Maybe Trump will drop out — take his toys and go back to his tower. Then the 168 members of the Republican National Committee will meet somewhere and pick a new nominee. Whatever. You can read about it during breaks in women’s gymnastics and still have more than two months to ponder your vote.

Maybe Hillary Clinton’s untrustworthy rating will actually exceed 100 percent. Maybe she’ll crash in the polls and retreat to a spa for a month. Whatever. We the voters will still have weeks and weeks and tweets and tweets to sort it out, after the Olympic closing ceremony.

But most likely, nothing truly consequential will happen, the whole politicalwarming climate will cool down and the air will freshen a tad and this whole calamity will feel less calamitous — for a blessed while at least.

This campaign has been the opposite of uplifting.

What better tonic could there be than rooting for someone or some team with crazy, silly abandon for a couple days? Especially if you choose an athlete to support randomly, with no prior attachment and therefore little risk of heartbreak when they don’t medal.

The randomness is part of the fun. My planned random interest this year is going to be men’s crew. I am going to pull for the Americans in the men’s double scull, but I intend to become a maven on the pairs from New Zealand and Slovenia.

I hope the television ratings for the Olympics set new records, too. I hope the cable news ratings and news websites’ traffic plummets to glorious lows. I hope Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump disappear from human consciousness for a couple weeks, replaced by fencing, table tennis and women’s kayaking.

I will be uplifted, damn it.