It is hard to imagine anything more guaranteed to make an
American’s heart swell and eyes mist over than our noble tradition
of open, free, and relatively fair elections.
It is hard to imagine anything more guaranteed to make an American’s heart swell and eyes mist over than our noble tradition of open, free, and relatively fair elections. It is the essence of everything we think we stand for, the first thing we mention when lecturing the world on our manifold virtues, the ideal we proudly show off like grandparents with baby pictures. In the commerce of political systems, Representative Democracy R Us.
And we have every right to be proud of it, as we have been bequeathed no greater gift by men of genius and vision, a nation whose common people rule themselves at every level, amending and re-creating government as they choose on a regularly scheduled basis.
Even in the midst of great wars, disasters, and social upheavals Americans return to the polls like clockwork to carry on the task of electing the best, the wisest, the most dedicated public servants to exercise the powers of sovereignty on our behalf. Time after time in a stately pageant now well into its third century we send our successful candidates off to city hall, to the county seat, to the state capitol, to Washington to undertake the process of governance of, by, and for the people.
And by so doing they immediately become the hated, feared, mistrusted government which we insult and excoriate at every opportunity. In the very act of being sworn into office our so recently anointed representatives are transmuted into our worst enemies, their mandate to govern drowned out in our howls of protest at their every attempt to do so.
The government we go to such pains to create and populate is our benchmark bad example of every form of activity. “You don’t want the government to be running this, do you?” “This is just a license for the government to take over and screw it up.” And the topper, “The government is the source of all our problems.”
Remarkably, this massive pledge of allegiance to the dark side takes place right after every election regardless of who wins. Republicans, Democrats, moderates, extremists – it doesn’t matter; the fresh-faced beneficiaries of our sacred franchise morph into the cast of “Night of The Living Dead” roaming the countryside to suck the life out of us every time. We can never seem to elect the right batch of people to improve our ghastly government from our worst nightmare to, say, a mere tequila hangover.
So since government is always under all circumstances guaranteed to be the very worst institution to do anything at all, why don’t we stop beating our heads against the wall of reality and just get rid of it lock, stock, and pork barrel?
I mean, doesn’t the logic of our eternal dissatisfaction with elected officials, our patriotic refusal to ever acknowledge that our government ever does anything good or necessary that couldn’t have been done much better by some gigantic corporation with an obscenely overpaid CEO compel the conclusion that we need to go in an entirely different direction?
So what other directions are there? There’s anarchy, where nothing is coherent and nobody does anything useful despite the appearance of feverish activity; an example of this administrative form can be found in the organizational chart of the Democratic Party. The anarchists’ credo is “That government governs best that doesn’t even give it a shot.”
Then there’s privatization, which is undoubtedly what we’re looking for. I mean, if you’re looking for pretty much anything that should be of, by, and for the people you can’t go wrong choosing organizations whose only reason for existing is to make and keep as much money as possible. It stands to reason.
But if we’re going to hand off all of our currently public functions to private interests how do we select who gets what? Maybe we should have some sort of competition, you know, let them try to persuade us to pick them and then we could assign a day to all get together and choose the winners. Of course we’d have to make them swear to act only in our best interests, and they should all be located in just a few cities so we know where to find them – places like Washington and Sacramento which will have a lot of big vacant buildings available. And at regular intervals we should decide if we want to keep these people or get new ones because we don’t like the way things are going.
Wait a minute …
Despite being an award-winning columnist, Robert Mitchell doggedly remains the same eccentric attorney who has practiced general law in Morgan Hill for more than 30 years. Reach him at r.****@*****on.net.
