On the Other Hand...
by Jim Davies
And the Winner Is... N.O.T.A.!
It's sick. It's really sick. Every election season, every single talking head, even those who talk sense occasionally, unite absolutely on one opinion: yes you must, you absolutely must go vote, next Tuesday. That is, last Tuesday.
Are they mindless idiots, or are they cynical manipulators? - B.O.T.A.
Take a for instance. Tim Russert, on what, CNBC? - often hosts quite an intelligent show, with guests from the media industry, icons like Tom Brokaw, who answer candidly some of Tim's fairly penetrating questions. And, Lo! and Behold: these news-readers actually have opinions of their own, and are able to defend them! I don't say they always make sense, but at least they are shown not to be 100% vacuous robots who place into the spoken, audible word whatever some faceless indoctrinator has committed to a scrolling teleprompter.
But on the weekend prior to November 3rd 1998, Russert had two guests who, fairly enough, disagreed with each other: the current Mistress of N.O.W., I forget her name but she was very charming; and Gary Bauer, idol of the Religious Right. What will happen Tuesday, and Why, etc., and will it be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. You know, the usual trivia.
Sure enough, the two guests politely but strongly disagreed, about every thing except one: Go, they said, absolutely do go vote. Never mind for whom or why, but vote. There are, one of them assured us, people in Albania who stand in line to vote!! and so therefore, go vote. Not only do they stand in line, they stand around the village square afterwards, to find out who won!
Translated into rational English, this means that they are saying that since Albanians have not yet discovered what a fraud it all is, or how absurd that any group of people should surrender any part of the rule over their own lives to anyone whatsoever, Go and Do Thou Likewise. Yuck!
It does graphically illustrate, doesn't it, that however large the superficial difference between these creeps who are invited on prime-time talk shows so often, there really isn't any serious difference between them at all. Yes, each would like to grab a better handle on the lever of power, each would drive you and me in a slightly different direction, but they are all totally united over one thing: any of Them are far more qualified than any of Us, to do the navigating. You, and I, are just too stupid to be allowed to operate our own destinies. I mean, whoever heard of mere peasants being in charge? - absurd. How can people as dumb as us be trusted to vote right? - easy! They know as well as we do, that our choice doesn't make any difference anyway!
Unglued
Happily, such brazen arrogance has gradually come apart at the seams, over the last few decades. The voter turnout has gone down, and down, and down. This time, it was (in my State, of New Hampshire) down to 43%.
That's 43% not of the whole population, of course, of all who are affected by the strutting tin gods who write the Laws, it's 43% of those who even think it's worth their while to go to register as voters. Those smart enough to see that there's more chance of being killed en route to the voting station than there is of affecting the outcome of a Presidential Election, don't even bother to register. And those under 18 (the very age the Elected claim the right to send people off to fight for them and maybe die) don't even get invited to register. So it's really 43% of about 60% of the population, which is 26%.
That's right: all those glorious victors reported by the Superfluous Media last Wednesday were actually elected by some plurality of 26% of the whole. If they exercised their rule just over the one-fifth or so who committed a vote for them, fair enough: but no, they assert the right to dominate 100% of the entire society, including all who didn't want to - or who couldn't - play in their silly, childish but deadly game.
And since only 43% turned out, 57% stayed home.
No matter how the votes among the 43% were distributed among the candidates, 57% is a whole lot larger than all of them put together, and so beyond question, the stay-at-homes won the election. And by adding to their number that of those who were not registered, the majority effectively voting for "none of the above" was around five times larger than the number of people voting for the winner, of any particular race. So if this society were actually run on democratic lines, NOTA would be the landslide winner and all these silly offices would accordingly be abandoned, and we'd all get back to the important task of running our own lives without their "help".
The Voting Rump
There's more good news: the shrinking rump of the population that did turn out to vote consisted largely of Democrats. The Dems never pretend to favor individual freedom and responsibility; they campaign on their clients' supposed "rights" to the fruits of the labor of the more productive in society, and so it is always in the interest of those parasites to vote. The Reps do pretend otherwise, and their voters more than any other stayed home. So, society is dividing between the producers who stay home in disgust and the parasites who go vote, and that's exactly the way it should be. Their nasty little scheme is becoming marginalized; gradually, the entire scam is becoming plainer.
The Republicans only pretend, however, they don't really believe in those ideals and never deliver; their "Contract with America" is now history. So this year's massive Republican Stay-at-Home is a well-deserved smack in the eye for the people who could have called down fire and brimstone on Slick Willie for violating our rights repeatedly under Amendments 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 9 (at least) but who instead tried to criticize him for telling fibs about a sordid affair.
"None of the Above." What a delightful thought.