House of Eratosthenes

Everyone hates the status quo, but I notice every candidate that rises up to challenge the status quo becomes embroiled by some kind of nonsense that makes them somehow “unelectable,” isn’t that strange?

Thompson has no “fire in the belly,” Palin comes off as a dingbat in a Katie Couric interview, Herman Cain sexually harassed someone with a non-sexual hand gesture — what is that?

Wow, I’d like to be a status quo everybody hates. Look at how little it has to do, to keep from being challenged…just stir up a ripple in the pond, so to speak, and the job’s done. Year after year. Amazing.

See, I’ve got something like a “learning disability” going on here: I have a long-term memory and I actually use the darn thing. And so a pattern emerges which, not only do I notice, but I find it impossible to ignore. All these little imbroglios end with a customary sign-off, like a Looney Tunes cartoon ending with “That’s all, folks!” To wit: Too bad about your candidate! Nothing to do with his reforms or his message, but [blank], blah blah blah he’s unelectable so you’ll just have to find another.

Well, maybe that’s the job requirement for United States President: Your worst enemies shouldn’t be able to find anything on you. But there’s a problem with that. That the “anythings” listed above, really are anything, is highly debatable. I have a simple litmus test for determining if a something is really worth avoiding: Once “The Big We” makes that decision, are we ultimately successful in avoiding it after the candidate has been eliminated on this basis? Well, last election, like all the elections that came before, we eliminated everyone in the running except one guy. He, um, uh, er, doesn’t have any more fire in the belly…uh…let me be clear…than Fred, uh, er, Thompson. So when the rubber meets the road, we don’t care too much about that. He’s as much an intellectual lightweight as Palin has ever been on her very worst day, we saw that with the “beer summit” and plug-the-damn-hole debacles. So the brain-horsepower, in the final analysis, isn’t too important to us either. And Cain’s situation — sorry I’m still not quite up on this, what is that again?

My point is not that President Obama is a bad President. I’ll get to that some other time. My point is that we aren’t avoiding anything.

There’s another problem with it. Aristotle nailed it over two thousand years ago:

To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

I remember when we took about ten months, give or take, to pick out our next President (or hang with the current one). It wasn’t that long ago. But nowadays, depending on your definition of when a campaign starts, we’re taking more like twenty months, thirty months, maybe more than that. There are those who say, and they have some facts on their side, that the campaign season is starting the day after the election or inauguration that ends the previous cycle, and we’re now living in a full-time presidential election situation whether we realize it or not. Hey ya know what? I have a big problem with that no matter what. If we’re putting in all this time and effort to elect a nothing, I have an even bigger problem with it.

But if the rules of the game are, that anyone who’d upset the applecart is to be summarily ejected and all the hubbub is about just finding the proper excuse for doing that, then we might as well come to terms with the fact that that’s our deal. We’re using up all 48 months in useless arguments to elect or re-elect a nothing. Aristotle’s nothing.

The “[blank] is an insurmountable problem, too bad, so sad go find another” argument seems to be for people who are lacking in my learning disability. People who can’t or won’t remember things and live strictly in the here-and-now. Like that guy you keep busy all day by handing him a card with “turn this over and obey instructions on the other side” on both sides.

You know, it occurs to me: Maybe that’s what the Occupy Wall Street protests really are. We vote, nothing changes, we end up frustrated — so people take to the streets desperate to find some way to express themselves, that might actually make a difference? From where I sit, it looks like voting is unsatisfactory because it has too much of a potential to change things. After all, it’s only become an ineffectual exercise because we made it that way. Right? Are the protests about “give us some decent candidates so things will change”? I don’t think so. You see them out there protesting against Herman Cain’s non-sexual sexual-harassment hand gestures? No…they’re protesting instead of voting, because protesting is more visible in its appearance, and — key point here — more futile in its substance.

Maybe what we’re really deciding is that elections aren’t for us anymore. The guy in charge, who it is, that’s just something we find to be an unwelcome distraction. That’s a dirty little secret about revolutionaries: They don’t really care who’s running everything. And from living in interesting times and observing what’s happening and learning what I can, I’m forming a realization that revolutionaries don’t care too much whether their revolutions succeed. In this way, they are close cousins with the establishment types who are supposed to be their enemies: Both kinds of people are simply craven scavengers, searching for refuge from any individual decisions that might alter the outcome. Yes, the revolutionary “demands” change. But if it happens, one time out of fifty or so, his role will be passive: “I was there when it all went down, I was a part of that thing.” It isn’t really his change. The mob owns that change, which means of course that nobody does.

Voting gives us a chance for real ownership. Mark Twain is supposed to have said, if it made a difference they’d never allow us to do it. I think the same could be said for protesting, though, and the thing about voting is the accountability. Of course, you don’t have to tell anyone how you voted, maybe what I should say is the association of your identity with an actual decision. People remember how they voted, decades after the fact. Just bring up Nixon or Humphrey or McGovern around someone who was old enough to vote. They’ll tell you how they voted, and why. They’ll wax lyrically about it. Now talk about those guys around someone who didn’t vote, but attended Woodstock. Nuthin’. Well, maybe a diatribe about “Nixon was a bad bad guy,” but nothing more definite than that, nothing about the direction this country should have been taken, other than “Get out of Vietnam” or something non-committal like that. He’s all about Woodstock, but you’ll have to ask him specifically about Woodstock to hear anything about Woodstock. Any difference between Woodstock, with him in it, and an alternative-universe Woodstock in which he didn’t participate? None whatsoever. The same could be said of the 1968 elections and the voter, of course, but with these populist uprisings and mass-crowd expressions — these “go through the motions of storming the Bastille without actually doing it” shows — the insignificance of the individual is the whole point.

Is that our future? We just can’t handle the responsibility of voting, so we’re rejecting it on that basis? Maybe so, maybe not. Perhaps the thing to do, is have an election to decide that. Make it our last one. If the motion carries, then from here on, we just keep one guy in charge forever. And then we all march around in front of the White House, with signs, to show everyone how unhappy we are with this guy.

It’s a reasonable request on my part, I think: Just stop doing things halfway. Stop having elections…or…have them, and use them as occasions to discuss ideas about what to do differently, and weigh the ideas on their merits rather than finding these feeble excuses to dislodge people who are promoting them. And if we opt to keep our elections, and you happen to like the status quo, or if you hate it but you’re missing the balls to change it, then vote that way. It’s not as exciting and you don’t get face time on the cameras and there’s not quite as much drama involved. But that’s the whole idea. It’s a civil duty, an obligation, like serving on a jury. It’s not about your ego, it’s about something much bigger.

Maybe what we’re really deciding is that elections aren’t for us anymore. The guy in charge, who it is, that’s just something we find to be an unwelcome distraction. That’s a dirty little secret about revolutionaries: They don’t really care who’s running everything.

I think you’re really onto something here. It’s perhaps the worst effect of Boomer narcissism — politics, and “change” generally, is just a public display of moral virtue. The end goal is to vote for “the right guy,” i.e. the guy who mouths the most plausible-sounding utopian platitudes, so that you can tell all your friends “of course I voted for Obama; who’s against Change?” or “I could never vote Republican; they want to kick blind paraplegic orphans out into the street to starve.”

You see proof of this in liberals’ complete lack of follow-through. Ask a liberal to provide evidence that any of his programs have worked, ever. Gay marriage is my go-to example, but really, they’re all good. He — or, of course, most likely she — will actually get offended at the question. But her rebuttal will always — 100% of the time — be something along the lines of how she’s a good person and you’re awful because aren’t you in favor of human rights? But ask them any followup question at all, and they’ve got nothing.

They neither know nor care if their stuff works. They voted for it; they get to tell all their friends they voted for it; this is proof they’re Good People; that’s enough. Same thing with the iRevolutionaries in Zuccotti Park — they, like, care about stuff, man!

[Gay marriage is my favorite example because
- Severian | 11/01/2011 @ 07:54

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Status QuoTuesday, November 1st, 2011

Status Quo
Tuesday, November 1st, 2011