“The most important election in …”

“This is the greatest financial disaster since …”

“We predict the largest voter turnout since … “

“There is more at stake in this election than … “

“Clearly this is the nastiest election in the history of  …”

“The country hasn’t been this divided since … “

The candidates, their campaigns, main stream media, new media, neighbors, friends, pastors, dentists, and bloggers have characterized the presidential election of 2008 in terms that should be reserved for the most prominent moments in history—you know, like the Big Bang, the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs, or universal heat death.  Based on the rhetoric students will never again need to study history because it has reached its zenith in the epic battle between two omnipotent forces.

Indeed, George W. Bush, because of his silence and lime-light avoidance, actually looks like the voice of reason, peace, and serenity in the midst of the election—which by most media accounts is the greatest upheaval in at least the history of the Milky Way.  Perhaps this Lama-like posture during this tectonic shift will be his real legacy.

Certainly the hyperbole has gotten out of hand and may be a symptom of a cultural disorder unique to our generation.  Historians looking back on this election cycle will likely not see galactic consequences, but they may see our rhetoric about it as a sign of a strange new strain of cultural narcissism.  Now it is not just “all about me” as an individual, but it is “all about us” as a society.  Everything we do, every crisis we face, every success we have is the greatest of all time.  Our elections, our choices are unprecedented in human history—at least that’s how the public rhetoric, ratcheted up to insane levels, is painting the picture.

Any student of America’s Civil War, or China’s Cultural Revolution, or the ancient Greek’s Battle of Salamis would think us mad for the grandiose descriptions of our own challenges.  While the rest of the world looks back on Pol Pot and his genocidal regime as a true incarnation of historic evil, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC is busy declaring, with majestic outrage, Sarah Palin to be “the worst person in the world”!  Only a deeply narcissistic and myopic social order could stomach such a wildly incongruous association.

The British writer C.S. Lewis must have seen this generation of cultural narcissists coming because he developed an antidote for it.  After witnessing the horrors of World War II, he wrote an essay titled “On the Reading of Old Books” in which he prescribed his cure.  “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”  In order to avoid thinking to highly (or lowly) of ourselves in any generation Lewis thought we should drink deeply at wells of past cultures.  “The only palliative,” he wrote, to keep our perspective in check “is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.”

A good word from a man who took his own medicine and as a result wrote books and essays that seem to stand far above our circumstances and grant us a much more balanced perspective on our current time and place.

In conclusion, just let me gaze at our collective cultural navel one last time and say this: we have seen in these last few months what would have to be considered, by any sentient being, far and away the most hyberbolic election rhetoric in the history of communication throughout eternity and throughout the visible and invisible cosmos.