LEGO America

If you use Google -- and if you're not a Microsoft or Yahoo employee, then you know that you do -- then, at some point, you've noticed that Google sometimes changes the word "Google" on its home page according to the season. For Christmas, it's dressed up for Christmas. For Valentine's Day the other day, there was a picture of a elderly couple in love and apparently sprinting away to some place where they didn't want to be watched. A few weeks ago, I clicked on Google and I noticed that the word "Google" depicted in square letters. I hadn't seen that before, so I looked closer. It turned out that it was the 50th anniversary of the LEGO brick.

This gave me a warm fuzzy because, man, I loved LEGO's when I was a kid -- especially Star Wars LEGO's. First, you'd assemble them according to the directions for whatever Star Wars ship you had bought or received and then, a week later, you'd tear them up and make race cars. The themed LEGO sets were the gateway to true LEGO obsession because, of course, the real attraction of LEGO's is the ability to make whatever the hell you want that you can get little bricks to form. Because you really don't care -- or at least I didn't care -- what color combination is involved with really great LEGO creations, they end up being a random mosaic of colors, kind of like the American melting pot as depicted on ABC's Schoolhouse Rock.

Which brings me finally to my point. In this most interesting of political years, the media is treating we voters -- at least the Democratic ones -- like LEGO bricks. It has become somewhat disturbing to watch television coverage of, and read print articles about, primary election returns because they are focusing so heavily on the demographics of the voters. Last week, Obama won Virginia and the big news was that he had cut into Clinton's "base" with "the female vote" and "the Latino vote." But the coverage didn't stop there: they then broke it down to how did how well with "white Catholics" and "white evangelicals." It's similar when Clinton wins.

It's as if the media sees the multi-colored LEGO creations that these candidates assemble to win in any given state and all that they want to do is smash them on the ground and examine the pieces. The pieces were never the point of LEGO's and are not the point of running an election. Do we really want people who want to be our president to be spending all of their time figuring out how to grind out a slightly higher percentage of the female Latino evangelical vote or the male biracial Hindu vote? Isn't that kind of thinking how we got to where we are today, which no one seems to think is where we should stay?

The joy of LEGO's is in their assembly. The assembly of voters hopefully will be the joy of this election year. The people who are telling us the story of this election need to remember that a little more.