Spite presents:

What Scandal?   Democracy Is Dead
Or, Powerball to the People

A post-election post-mortem

by James Williamson

It was by far the flashiest, most disco of all the governmental models, and now it's gone.
November 16, 1998 -- Turn out the lights, pack up the kids, and fold the tents; our grand 220-year-old experiment is over. Democracy is dead. It's been kicked, prodded, probed, mishandled, raped, and left for dead on the side of the road. Just like Communism before it, Democracy has gone belly-up in the political system fish-kill of the twentieth century. It was by far the flashiest, most disco of all the governmental models, and now it's gone. It is the Jon Benet of dead governments; young, sexy, and energetic, but all it really did was leave a pretty corpse.

I arrived at this inescapable conclusion by merely surveying the post-election wasteland of 1998. In truth, I could have come to this conclusion years earlier, but I think I have been in denial over the seriousness of the problem. Look around you at our nation's leaders. Over two hundred years of refinement and all we can come up with is Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Dan Quayle, and Al Gore? True, Newt's gone, but his own party cannabalized him, the Georgians certainly weren't about to vote him out any time soon. My own region of the country has sent such notables to the Senate as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms; fine, upstanding relics of the Neanderthal tribe. Mix in such ideological pap smears as Barney Frank and Ted Kennedy and what you've got is not a government, but a 3 trillion dollar a year day care center with all the kids fighting for the same marbles. Great entertainment to be sure, but horrible government.

Who let these bozos in? You did. Well, me too, but I primarily blame you.
This, of course, begs the question, who let these bozos in? Who the hell left the monkey cage unlocked? You did. Well, me too, but I primarily blame you. Democracy only works to represent the majority when the majority actually votes. Guess what; the majority does not vote. This year, only 36.1 percent of the American Electorate turned out to vote (an all time low since 1942). On average, only around 38 to 40 percent of the body electorate usually shows up to flip the switch. That means that only 21 percent of the population picks who plays on what team. That's just the national elections, local elections are even worse. Some cities and municipalities only get voter turnout in the 10 to 30 percent range. 10 to 30 percent!

Do the math; in a city of 100,000 people, if only 10% of the people turn out to vote, you only need 5,001 votes to win a two person election. There are churches, Elks clubs, and PTA groups with memberships over 5000. If you want to win a city election, don't campaign, just pay off the Elks club. It's cheaper, and the buffet dinners are better. That's why elected officials take pay offs, raise taxes, and pander to special interests. They only need to keep 20 percent of their constituents rolling in pork fat to keep their jobs.

The majority of the country has made Three's Company a hit TV show and Keanu Reeves a millionaire.
I realize, of course, that higher voter turnout alone is not the answer, maybe not even desirable. Take a weekend visit to Wal-Mart. Stroll down to the grocery store or take in a movie on Friday night. Look closely at the people around you. Do you trust these people to elect the leader of the free world? The majority of the country has made Three's Company a hit TV show and Keanu Reeves a millionaire. Millions tune in each week to see what those zany aliens on 3rd Rock from the Sun are up to, millions more buy whatever high pitched, French-accented warbling Celine Dion can throw at them. I, for one, do not have faith in the vast majority of Americans to make what I would call, "quality judgments."

Besides, it's not like we have Solomon-like wise men lining up for government service. Even if 100% of the people had turned out to vote in 1996, Bob Dole or Bill Clinton would have still been President. Part of the reason Democracy did her Jane Mansfield impression is the lack of qualified participants. The highest voter turnout of any state in the nation in 1998 was Minnesota. They elected Jesse "The Body" Ventura as governor.

The people who should hold office simply won't run. Would you? To be president, think of all the belly-groveling, ass-kissing humiliation you have to go through to position yourself for a run. Then factor in the relentless prying into your personal life by the press and your opponents. If you win, you get to discard any private life you once had, butt heads with the piss-ants in Congress over budgetary items that never get solved, get blamed when some rag-head with a martyr complex blows up a market in Jerusalem, and have the occasional fruit-loop with a gun fly a plane into your house. All this for what; a little over $100,000 a year, continued threats on your life even after you leave office, and some squat, ugly library in Topeka, Kansas that will house all of your worthless memos for eternity? Sign me up.

So the end result of our noble endeavor is a stupid, apathetic electorate and an unqualified leadership. Clearly changes are in order. But what? Do we scrap the system and start over? Just tweak it a little? Let's examine our options.

Communism: Nationalize all businesses and start throwing all the smart people in jail.
First we could burn the bridges. Tear down the wall of voter choice and replace it with another edifice entirely. How about Communism? Outlaw the Republican party, nationalize all businesses and corporations, let the labor unions run them, say good-bye to all your take home pay and start throwing all the smart people in jail. Take away all family-owned farms (wait a minute, I think we're doing that one), and replace all crops with wheat. No soybeans, no tomatoes, no corn; just wheat. For good measure we'll make all youth serve at least 2 years in the military, and we'll start spending our rapidly shrinking resources on large government projects that will never be finished and that will never work. Everyone will also be issued one large grey overcoat that they must wear at all times.

O.K, so Communism isn't such a good idea, how about a simple dictatorship? We could set caution to the wind and submit to the will of a charismatic pol! Usually this results in mass starvation, goon squads, large statues of said pol everywhere, and a strange desire to wear khaki. Again, no thank you.

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