Here's my October "no surprise" - I'm officially sick of the presidential election.

I'm not sure exactly when I reached my saturation point - somewhere between the YouTube video of a Yoko Ono-esque woman directing the "Obama Youth Choir" and the opinion piece I read assessing the authenticity and relevance of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's "Minnewegian" accent. It's come to this.

No wait - it was Friday on an airplane bound for Wichita, Kan. I was chatting with a woman headed home for her high school reunion, when the subject of the previous evening's vice-presidential debate came up.

My seatmate and I both had missed it. For my part, a long-planned speaking engagement conflicted with the event. The woman in seat 5B had another reason.

"I actually can't bring myself to watch Sarah Palin," she said. "There's no way I could sit there and listen to anything she had to say."

Say it ain't so, seatmate.

I want to be careful not to seem overzealous. After all, a columnist loses all credibility by making sweeping generalizations or oversimplifying the cultural and social issues that confront us. My statements must ring true without hyperbole, if I'm going to be taken seriously.

With that caveat in mind, I submit: MTV is killing our culture.

Specifically, the annual cultural orgy known as the MTV Video Music Awards, held Sunday evening in Los Angeles, at which awards were given for outstanding achievement in the creation and production of music videos.

Suppose that we ignore the relative merits of music videos as an art form. Not since Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video have I seen one that captured my attention. But that one cost a cool bajillion dollars to produce, and no one wears wolf makeup or red leather jackets anymore.

I will never forget the Democratic National Convention of 1968. Not because I understood what was happening in the streets of Chicago regarding the police force, the Illinois National Guard and mobs of antiwar protesters, nor because I followed the political maneuvering that ultimately secured the nomination of Hubert Humphrey for president.

No, what I remember was the shriek my mother let out when she discovered that while the family was gathered around the TV in the family room, my 3-year-old sister had wandered off, found a pair of scissors and cut several huge bald spots into the back of her hair.

Mind you, I was only 7. My capacity to understand the political battle on TV was limited, so the drama around my sister's new "do" was for me a bit more concrete.

If my younger sister lacked appropriate supervision, the times were to blame. This was August in Detroit. The riot of the previous summer was as fresh on the minds of my family as the scene that unfolded in Chicago.

I doubt my grasp of the convention was little more than impressions, but this I knew - whatever was going on had my parents glued to the television. It had to be important.

They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. What happened in between this year was something like a fox, at least around my house.

Here are some March highlights in the life of Amy, my fifth-grader:

• Visited orthodontist

• Participated in science fair

• Learned what prostitutes do for a living

Thank you, Eliot Spitzer, for that last little educational nugget.

Sigh.