There are better ways to spend 56 days

I once knew a priest who said that hearing confessions — that endless chronicling of white lies, petty deceits and foul language — was like being stoned to death with popcorn. Which sounds, if you think about it, like a pretty fair description of the 56- day federal election campaign on which this country has just embarked.

Fifty- six days! Good God, ferrets, foxes and hamsters have shorter gestation periods than that. Didn’t Britney Spears get in and out of a marriage in less time? Across Canada, people will begin and end jail terms between the issuing of the writ a month before Christmas and the casting of the ballots a month after it. With a campaign that long, voters might well think by voting day that Stephen Harper’s promised cut in the GST, made to no small fuss as the marathon opened, was of a vintage with the King- Byng crisis.

It is a campaign so ridiculously, eye- glazingly, mind- numbingly long, in fact, that the governing Liberals apparently aren’t even bothering to join it until much later.

Isn’t it odd? Just when the NHL gets its act together and serves up some free- wheeling flash and dash after years of clutch and grab, the country has inflicted upon it the political equivalent of the neutral- zone trap — weeks and weeks and tedious weeks of the players trying chiefly to stay out of trouble while tripping up the other guy. How, in the age of speed- dating and 30- minutes- or- it’s- free, did we end up with an election campaign that already feels like the death march to Bataan?

Don’t get us wrong. Of course elections are important. Citizens in scores of countries around the world would love to have them. But do Canadians really need the better part of two months to make up their minds? Especially about this painfully familiar lot?

Actually, there’s a good case to be made that most of life’s most important decisions — from matters of the heart to the pocketbook — are made not in months but in minutes.

Last year, scientists from Ohio State University said the impression made in the first 10 minutes after meeting someone was enough to predict whether we’ll become friends or lovers. If strangers introduced liked each other within three minutes, chances are they still did months later. If they didn’t click quickly, they almost never did. “We seem to be very quick about making these judgments and they seem to hold,” one of the researchers said.

Earlier this year, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell published a book called Blink, an account of how snap decisions are made, how little information is needed to make them, and how often — because of what’s known as our “ adaptive unconscious” — they tend to be sound. The only way human beings could have survived as a species for as long as we have, Gladwell wrote, is because we’ve developed a kind of “ decision- making apparatus that’s capable of making very quick judgments based on very little information.” And it’s not just choosing friends or mates or deciding whether to hire someone that’s done quickly. Most of us don’t need 56 days to decide on a car or a house to buy. Sell your house, the biggest asset most of us ever own, and you normally get until midnight — mere hours — to decide whether to accept an offer. So let’s put this 56- day exercise in perspective.

Last year, British author Ian McEwan wrote an entire novel, Saturday, about a single day in the life of a London neurosurgeon. The filmmaker Richard Linklater has made two charming movies — Before Sunrise and Before Sunset

— from the events of even less time than that, as a young couple meet, flirt, spill their hearts, fall in love in a fabulous rush, split, then years later reunite and do it all again. The record shows that a lot of important things get wrapped up in a lot less than 56 days. The Arabs and Israelis managed an entire war in six days. According to the Old Testament, the world was created in a week — with a day off to rest up. The journalist John Reed called his account of the Russian Revolution Ten Days that Shook the World.

Jack Kerouac churned out his iconic On the Road in a feverish three- week writing binge fuelled by Benzedrine and coffee. Rehab clinics typically spin- dry their clients ( of whom Kerouac might profitably have been one) in treatment stays that are 28 days. This year’s entire major league baseball playoffs — from divisional series to league championships to the Chicago White Sox triumph — were conducted in less than a month. Even Christ’s sojourn in the wilderness, including the temptation by Satan — serious business by any measure — was dealt with in 40 days. So here’s the question:

If humankind can fall in love, risk fortunes, win wars, stage revolutions, create masterpieces, settle sports titles and endure crises of faith in days and weeks, why in-the-name-offourwearing- funny- hats do we need 56 days to make a choice? Jim Coyle usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.