Reading through some old columns, I just came across one I wrote in 1994 about an ad touting a sandwich shop that was giving away condoms. The ad was held out of the Evanston Township High School newspaper for the reason—which I called “hoary” even then—that it was a little too raw for “impressionable teenagers.”
It was a time, apparently—though did anyone ever actually think this?—when it was supposed that impressionability was something teenagers grew out of as they became adults. I don’t think we suppose that anymore—not after a presidential race in which the impression that Donald Trump would stir things up and get the country back on track went down to the wire against the impression that Trump was a good bet to set off World War III.
I’m not saying both these impressions were equally outlandish. I am saying America voted with its viscera. I read the cases made for both Trump and Hillary Clinton, but no case ever advanced either candidate much beyond the stature of default choice for voters who threw up in reaction to their impression of the other.
“Impressionable adults went to the polls across America Tuesday” would have been a novel way to begin an election-day story, but very accurate, I think.
