I was a political junkie before I could speak. Or thereabouts. I was half-nerd, half-savant.

But my political addiction isn’t satisfied by election night anymore. The modern era has washed away the suspense of who our next POTUS will be. Metadata so windy and circuitous is now placed on a variety of gigantic iPads, telling us who our Commander-in-Chief will be a month before the election. All this because of some focus group in Pignuts, Iowa, and other places like it, where you can find every conceivable breakdown of the “real” American man/woman, the human avatar representing each variation on the human being: black, white, Latino, Asian, reader of the Bible, lover of the the Bible, gun carrier, lover of his/her gun, would-be performer of coitus with his/her gun if so allowed by a particular state (and I believe there are no state restrictions on gun-loving at present). Coitus with gun while Bible is present. Coitus while an Asian gun is present (again, I believe this is allowed in all 50 states). And so on.

The combination of focus groups and data has killed a great American thrill: the presidential nomination and election process.

One can probably date the demise back to that “No one saw it coming!” night when Jimmy Carter got creamed by Ronald Reagan in 1980. The modern era, meanwhile — with data and stats and pundits reading the newly minted data and stats, as other pundits and commentators try to affix the patina of an action-packed James Bond film to a presidential election night that’s essentially a snoozer — is just a lot of sound and fury.

But it’s not like we gave up hope overnight. While Reagan was drifting off at the wheel, it became prudent and financially wise to get an MBA, take a course in statistics, and enter an industry that makes an insurance broker look like a uranium miner. Data visualization — it’s pretty cool, but it’s like knowing what all your presents are before Christmas. Today’s dirty little secret is that all these stat freaks already know the answer. They know who’s going to win.

Today’s dirty little secret is that all these stat freaks already know the answer. They know who’s going to win.

For me, back in the day, it was the GOP and Democratic conventions that got my heart pounding.  I received special parental dispensation during the two weeks of the two conventions, which I found wonderful, yet odd, as I was punished for every other possible sin. It just seemed natural that I would face a special sort of hell for staying up until 3 or 4 a.m., watching these great fights between delegates screaming at each other about each party’s platform: Vietnam, Cambodia, inflation, more screaming, journalists being manhandled and shoved around. The issues were important. Life-and-death important. Dispensation? Perhaps my parents knew big things were at stake, or maybe they just didn’t give a shit.

I can tell you one thing: We don’t give a shit about the “issues” anymore. Our modern American conventions look like variety shows with a We Have Talent or America Loves Assholes theme.

Think about it: We don’t have floor flights and shrieking issues debates anymore, because we just don’t know what the candidates really support. You may know what they don’t stand for, though. In this past cluster of an election, Clinton stood for keeping private every bit of minutiae since she was eight years old and selling Girl Scout cookies. Trump stood for complete and utter stonewalling as it pertains to everything he’s made, put his name on, branded, etc., originating both inside and outside of the United States.

I suppose Trump also stood for obliterating what he sees as our national mediocrity — by building a fucking wall. A wall that every geologist says would be silly at best. A wall that would require a set of Hiroshima-type blasts to penetrate mountains, rivers, and canyons, then bring back the people we forcibly deported to build the damn thing. Legally. That would take ten to fifteen years. Just getting your head around it would take ten to fifteen years.

In any event, everybody at the GOP convention last summer seemed to enjoy this proposition, yet one got the sense that the delegates didn’t really, exactly, honest-to-goodness buy into this horseshit, as it was — how might an engineer put it? — absolutely batshit crazy. Or as a geologist might say, absolutely and unbelievably batshit crazy. Oh, and never mind the morality of the event occurring in our highly educated and sophisticated society. Something similar happened in a highly educated and sophisticated Central European society, which is why I have no extended family.

You didn’t see too much of VP nominees Pence and Kaine at the conventions, or after the conventions. That’s because they were zombies. What middle-aged, white-haired zombieland did those two come from? Though, hand it to Kaine, he still tried out that rebel yell, that hootenanny howl. As for Trump’s running mate, I’m willing to bet cash money that every morning, even now, when Mike wakes up, Mrs. Pence whispers, “You sold your soul, you sold your soul, you sold your soul.” And then he brushes his teeth, finds a nook or cranny in some Indiana cornfield, and softly weeps.

But let’s not let our Democratic friends off the hook. Hillary Clinton collapsed on her way to her SUV. Remember that? Whether it was pneumonia or because she truly grasped the magnitude of carrying around thirty thousand emails she refused to show anybody, including apparently the FBI (whose job it is to look at potentially felonious emails; I’m guessing the FBI gave up and left it to Russian hackers: Fuck it. You deal with it, Vladimir et al. We’re done.).

I suggest that all political conventions convene in Las Vegas forevermore. You already know what the outcome is going to be. Nobody wins and, as they say, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

Including — and especially — our dignity.

PHOTOS: Getty Images/The Washington Post; Getty Images / Robyn Beck