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RE: Voting, Why it Sucks & More Reality TV(NOTE: I know this may be too long-winded for a Letters Section, but its been laying in my e-mailbox since Sept 6th. Perhaps you may find it mildly interesting or amusing. Feel free to use it in whole or in part, as a letter, article etc. I'd post it on alt.politics.scorched-earth, but I don't think anybody goes there anymore, which saddens me about as much as hearing Baywatch was canceled. My suggestion is that you print it off and keep it as emergency ass-wipe for the impending Holocaust.) Dear President Vogel, As usual, I couldn't agree with you more. If nothing else, it shows both of our intelligence. Voting IS pointless. In the USA, the difference between the 2 Parties is less than the difference between Pepsi & Coke. Both are overpriced, over hyped, sugar-water produced by virtual monopolies. Their product may taste sweet, but it rots your teeth and gives you gas & zits. The sugar & caffeine blend initially gives you a promising kick of energy, but long term use cruelly leaves you fat and depressed. Indeed, this is an apt analogy to the Two Party Electoral system. Because the first place finisher takes all and the rest walk away with nothing, everyone but the winner's supporters are better off staying home and masturbating to Body Shaping. Thanks to modern technology and statistics, we can predict the winner in advance and are obsessed with doing so. "Winability" is the focus of all election coverage. Issues and abilities are only brought up within the context good/bad optics and poll results. CNN addicts and the American intelligentsia (oxymoron) are rarely surprised on election night. Even the drooling, knuckle-dragging American public has caught on. In fact, they're light years ahead of the press. They know who is going to win every election and it sure as hell ain't them! It's going to be one of two products manufactured by rival divisions of the same mega-corporation. Thus the slack-jawed masses stay home Election night and use their TV to play Atari Combat instead. Who can blame them? But the more commoners that don't vote, the less likely the winner reflects them. To break this downward spiral, I challenged it in a pointless, gory head-on collision that proved elections are pointless and rigged. Last November, I ran for Mayor of my pathetic little Duckburg. The City of London's population may be 330,000, but it acts like a town of 3,300. Think Hazzard County without Southern accents. The Mayor had retired after a surreal 6 years in office. Her hand picked successor, known as "The Mayor's Little Sister", was running unopposed. I and six other crackpots blew $100 on the deposit and stuck our names on the ballot at the last minute. My shtick was to run on the most preposterous, unpopular platform I could imagine, yet get enough votes to remain within a Standard Deviation of the other guys who were doing their best with real issues. The idea was to publicly prove elections mean nothing. In fact, I declared this in a Town Hall meeting. I could have the best policies and platforms of anyone, or I could give my campaign speeches talking out of my ass, a-la Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura. It wouldn't change the outcome one bit. The powers that be select the Mayor in the backroom of The Hunt Club and the voting public (all 33% of them) just rubberstamp the decision. In true Scorched Earth fashion, I achieved exactly what I set out to do. I got about 1,300 votes despite promising in my flyers and at a Town Hall meeting to: - pave over everything in town but the buildings, get rid of all traffic & parking regulations and let nature take its course. - enclose the rich half of the city in a giant geodesic dome, declare it the world's largest mall, & flatten the poor half to make a parking lot. - to make the city rich by burning all of North America's garbage in incinerators built next to hospitals and old folks' homes. (The city actually has an incinerator next to a hospital.) One promise I was very proud of, the one most relevant to this topic, (at long last!) was my common sense proposal for Civic Election reform. I proposed to do away with elections and replace them with a Reality TV show. Here's some clippings from my flyers to show how it would work... "About 30 randomly selected volunteers will be put in the soon-to-be-emptied London Psychiatric Hospital, an appropriate location. Cameras will be placed to catch every move of the Candidates. They will have no privacy and no outside contact will be allowed. It will be broadcast on (the only local TV channel) nightly and live 24/7 on the Internet. Instead of challenges, Candidates are given Bylaws to argue over. Bylaws will be drawn from a box containing suggestions from Londoners. (IE. Everyone must wear plaid pants or own a pet squirrel.) At week's end, they get together, paint their faces and vote on the Bylaw in the Elector-Shock Chambers, a TV-confessional room. If passed, it will become a real City Bylaw, Tribal Council will have spoken. Those on the losing side of the vote are Nominated for Banishment. Viewers will then eject the Candidate of their choice in a $1/call phone in vote. The process continues until a winner is chosen. He/she gets $500,000 and the job of Mayor until next season's election. The rest of the top 15 make up Council. In our current system, virtual unknowns slip into vacancies left by retiring councilors. Once there, they keep getting re-elected, because they're the only names we recognize. My system will change this. After months of isolation, with every word and deed seen on TV, we'll know every Candidate better than our own family members. We'll see all their faults and strengths. We'll see what they really think and how trustworthy they really are. All we have to go on today are the glimpses we catch in stage-managed election campaigns and council meetings. In many ways, my system lets us know our leaders better, gives us more say in their selection and lets us hold them immediately accountable for their actions. It would increase attention paid to City Hall and the prospect of becoming a celebrity would encourage people to get involved. It even lets us propose our own laws." While I didn't run under the Scorched Earthy Party banner, I declared in the Town Hall Meeting that I was a proud member. As a proud member, I strongly urge the adoption of this electoral reform policy for the next election. It's the perfect slap in the face to the establishment, an absolutely preposterous idea that truly is an improvement over the status quo. My favourite alias, Peter Schuller Like computer games? A great fantasy adventure awaits you here. |
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