S omeone threw a dildo on to the playing field. It happened last Sunday, during the third quarter of omeone threw a dildo on to the playing field. It happened last Sunday, during the third quarter of a nationally televised NFL game between the Buffalo Bills and the New England Patriots . Millions of Americans watched, rolled their eyes and thought to themselves: “Well, that about sums it up.”

So, who threw it? A Hillary supporter, obviously. Someone fed up with all the degradation women have been subjected to in this election: infidelity, groping, sexting, the whole septic undertow of alpha-male sludge currently spewing into the Atlantic and Pacific. And, finally, one lone heroine stood up and hurled an allegorical Johnson on to a football field, where it got trampled by 22 pairs of male feet.

Or … was it a Trumpster? A lifelong blue-collar Buffaloan who has watched his city’s industrial prowess wane? Maybe his daddy made dildos and his granddaddy made dildos, and then Hillary became senator and all those dildo jobs moved overseas. And now these New England Patriots – east coast intellectual elites – show up with their crooked, ball-deflating quarterback, Tom Brady , and humiliate Buffalo on their home field. So, in a desperate act of defiance, an angry man hurls an inferior Chinese-made dildo at the Patriots’ offence. A way of saying: “The Revolution Has Begun.”

Make no mistake: it was a political event. Americans are frustrated and they are throwing dildos. They’re fed up and they don’t give a rat’s ass if the rest of the world is laughing at them. The air of “fresh start” is no longer alive in most places in America. We are sleepwalking into oblivion and for those, like me, raised in the twilight of a world where being president was still a noble thing, it cuts pretty deep. History has always been able to extract some shred of sacrosanctity from the electoral process, no matter how awful it turned out. But it’s looking as if that warranty has expired and our republic is now an ageing Maytag churning through its final rinse cycle. Whatever comes out is going to be damp, foetid and reeking of effluviant. And we’re gonna have to wear it.

If Trump wins, I’m going to enjoy the spectacle of a man wrestling within himself. Driven by inherent narcissism, he would strive to be The Greatest President Ever, a trait we look for in our leaders. But if his itchy-finger temperament prevails, he might nuke Egypt simply because they lied about the cotton threadcount in his bedsheets.

Hillary, on the other hand, is a dead-eyed cyborg, held together with rivets and WD-40. She has been encamped in our lives for so long that handing her the presidency somehow feels like a lifetime achievement award. But she’s dirty and corrupt and contemptuous of national security. These are our choices, folks: a pair of assholes. What is an asshole? A person who thinks they’re entitled to an advantage. A person who has immunised themselves against all criticism.

They can’t hear your complaints. They’re too caught up in their own ambition. It’s OK to be an asshole if you have talent. Pablo Picasso and Miles Davis were assholes, but we forgave them because they gave something back. And the reason they were assholes was because they couldn’t abide anything that got in the way of their talent or vision. But Trump has no talent. And Hillary has no vision. No fresh vision, anyway. So the American voter has a dilemma. “Let’s see, should I go with a six-times-bankrupt businessman who once thought it was a genius idea to sell steaks at The Sharper Image? Or the woman who might as well be reading her top-level-security emails off the jumbotron at Yankee Stadium

Frankly, I don’t know how history is going to spit-polish this one. America’s greatest attribute has always been its ability to mythologise its stupid mistakes, to turn world-class blunders into cultural gold. We glorify our exceptionalism. We downplay our history of slavery, segregation, nativism and violence until we can find a way to turn it into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Chiwetel Ejiofor. Unlike Brits, we always forgive ourselves. But I don’t know how we’re ever going to illuminate Trump or Clinton with any kind of flattering historical rewrite.

Besides, they have already been encapsulated perfectly in films: Biff in Back to the Future and Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People.

Who am I going to vote for? Hillary. Only because she lies 30% less than Trump. I’m tempted to sit this whole thing out, but I can’t. I still believe in the antiquated currency of the ballot. I am grateful, as an American, that two useful idiots have offered themselves up as scapegoats for everything wrong with my country. That’s the beauty of having a president. When the world isn’t treating us right, when the creepy kid at school goes out and shoots up the mall, when we’re up to our asses in floodwater and raw sewage because the county commissioners didn’t buy enough sandbags to shore up the levee, who has to show up and apologise? The president, that’s who.

Every night, the president crawls into bed and says: “Guess what, honey? Half the people in the country today called me an asshole!”

God bless ’em.