Baby Lee
11-16-2006, 04:27 PM
unless you're smart like me
Linky (www.columbiaspectator.com/media/storage/paper865/news/2006/11/03/Opinion/Please.Dont.Vote-2437317.shtml?sourcedomain=www.columbiaspectator.com&MIIHost=media.collegepublisher.com)
Voting does not make a difference, and most people shouldn't do it.
Before you ram your fist through a wall in rage, let me stress that I am not saying there are no reasons to vote. Specifically, there are two. (I'll get to them later, just so you'll have something to look forward to in life.) In general, however, the goal of any conscientious Columbia student ought to be keeping everyone else away from the polls.
We all know that the public at large is stupid, just as we all think of ourselves as the rare exception to that stupidity, but in America the problem reaches epic proportions. Just consider that Arrested Development lasted only three seasons, whereas Survivor is still in the top 10 in the Nielsen Ratings even though it's still just idiots sweating in foreign lands, except now with racism. Politically, this stupid public's decision-making resulted in President George W. Bush's winning of a majority vote after one of the worst terms in American history, with the exception of his second. Some might argue that Sen. John Kerry was a pathetic alternative, and they are of course correct, but the people nonetheless chose guaranteed incompetence over merely likely incompetence. Letting Americans choose their own leaders is like allowing a 4-year-old to choose his religion except that, with the elections, it's an entire nation going straight to hell.
The goal of Columbia students, then, should be to prevent as many people as possible from ever reaching the polls. This is why I always cringe when I see something like Rock the Vote. Anyone watching enough MTV to be persuaded by it has already proven that he can't even choose good TV shows or music. We don't want this person in any way affecting national politics. The same holds true for anyone who would respond to Diddy's confusing death threats. Here we can follow the strategy that tobacco companies use when running ads about quitting smoking: let's just show old people voting, desperately trying to pretend it's cool.
Obviously that strategy won't work for older voters. As people age, they become more difficult to rouse into inaction. We can forget about keeping World War II veterans at home, for example, unless we hide their keys or something. For everyone else, we will need to convince them that their vote does not matter. This should be easy since it's absolutely true. Morons like to claim that every vote counts-that anybody might cast the deciding ballot. Actually, in any election, only one vote matters-all the others either cancel each other out or reinforce the one important one. If former Vice President Al Gore beats Bush 500,100 to 500,000, then 1 million people just neutralized each other, and 99 simply repeated what one important guy did. Sometimes, as with Bush versus Gore, even that guy doesn't matter.
Unfortunately, you can't always count on blatantly obvious truth to convince people. We may have to turn to the old cliche of mocking the choice of candidates. No matter how exposed we are to the reality of inevitably terrible options, they're still discouraging. In my congressional district back home, one of the candidates supports building a wall on the Mexican border and wants to divide Iraq into three regions and let the major ethnicities work things out with militias. And that's the Democrat. His opponents are a slightly less insane Republican and a Libertarian-clearly there are no right choices here. Knowing that you can pick only from these absolute failures of men is cripplingly depressing, which is exactly the kind of emotional abuse we need to keep people at home on the big day.
Every once in a while, of course, one decent candidate emerges. In New York, that man is gubernatorial contender Jimmy McMillan, a real person. Running on the platform "rent is too damn high" for the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, his campaign Web site, rentistoodamnhigh.org, is a masterpiece of political thought, especially the rap song that plays when you visit it, the lyrics to which are "ooo-ee" and "rent is too damn high." You might think he at least sounds focused, but the site covers a broad range of topics, including the time McMillan climbed the Brooklyn Bridge and warded off policemen with a "Rambo-style combat knife." It even touches on his disappointment with the war on terror, which he almost prevented by uncovering a plot involving "Al Quida" and some Orthodox Jews. "If someone would have only listened," he laments on the site. I have never been this excited about a political candidate.
This brings us to the two reasons you should vote. First, voting for a crazy knife-wielding conspiracy theorist would be funny. Second, someone has to try to counteract most of America. Columbia students generally know what's going on in the world and have the capacity for understanding it, legacy admissions excepted of course. We have an obligation to make as many votes useless as possible by neutralizing them with our own. If voting is truly a sacred duty, then we must keep it out of the hands of all these idiots, or at least send enough thinking people to the polls to silence those with whom we disagree.
This Tuesday, do your patriotic duty, and encourage as many people to stay home as possible. Then sneak out a window and vote while they're watching black people arm-wrestle white people on Survivor. We don't want to look back on high voter turnout and think what might have been if someone would have only listened.
J.D. Porter is a Columbia College junior majoring in English. The Lion's Roar runs alternate Fridays.
Linky (www.columbiaspectator.com/media/storage/paper865/news/2006/11/03/Opinion/Please.Dont.Vote-2437317.shtml?sourcedomain=www.columbiaspectator.com&MIIHost=media.collegepublisher.com)
Voting does not make a difference, and most people shouldn't do it.
Before you ram your fist through a wall in rage, let me stress that I am not saying there are no reasons to vote. Specifically, there are two. (I'll get to them later, just so you'll have something to look forward to in life.) In general, however, the goal of any conscientious Columbia student ought to be keeping everyone else away from the polls.
We all know that the public at large is stupid, just as we all think of ourselves as the rare exception to that stupidity, but in America the problem reaches epic proportions. Just consider that Arrested Development lasted only three seasons, whereas Survivor is still in the top 10 in the Nielsen Ratings even though it's still just idiots sweating in foreign lands, except now with racism. Politically, this stupid public's decision-making resulted in President George W. Bush's winning of a majority vote after one of the worst terms in American history, with the exception of his second. Some might argue that Sen. John Kerry was a pathetic alternative, and they are of course correct, but the people nonetheless chose guaranteed incompetence over merely likely incompetence. Letting Americans choose their own leaders is like allowing a 4-year-old to choose his religion except that, with the elections, it's an entire nation going straight to hell.
The goal of Columbia students, then, should be to prevent as many people as possible from ever reaching the polls. This is why I always cringe when I see something like Rock the Vote. Anyone watching enough MTV to be persuaded by it has already proven that he can't even choose good TV shows or music. We don't want this person in any way affecting national politics. The same holds true for anyone who would respond to Diddy's confusing death threats. Here we can follow the strategy that tobacco companies use when running ads about quitting smoking: let's just show old people voting, desperately trying to pretend it's cool.
Obviously that strategy won't work for older voters. As people age, they become more difficult to rouse into inaction. We can forget about keeping World War II veterans at home, for example, unless we hide their keys or something. For everyone else, we will need to convince them that their vote does not matter. This should be easy since it's absolutely true. Morons like to claim that every vote counts-that anybody might cast the deciding ballot. Actually, in any election, only one vote matters-all the others either cancel each other out or reinforce the one important one. If former Vice President Al Gore beats Bush 500,100 to 500,000, then 1 million people just neutralized each other, and 99 simply repeated what one important guy did. Sometimes, as with Bush versus Gore, even that guy doesn't matter.
Unfortunately, you can't always count on blatantly obvious truth to convince people. We may have to turn to the old cliche of mocking the choice of candidates. No matter how exposed we are to the reality of inevitably terrible options, they're still discouraging. In my congressional district back home, one of the candidates supports building a wall on the Mexican border and wants to divide Iraq into three regions and let the major ethnicities work things out with militias. And that's the Democrat. His opponents are a slightly less insane Republican and a Libertarian-clearly there are no right choices here. Knowing that you can pick only from these absolute failures of men is cripplingly depressing, which is exactly the kind of emotional abuse we need to keep people at home on the big day.
Every once in a while, of course, one decent candidate emerges. In New York, that man is gubernatorial contender Jimmy McMillan, a real person. Running on the platform "rent is too damn high" for the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, his campaign Web site, rentistoodamnhigh.org, is a masterpiece of political thought, especially the rap song that plays when you visit it, the lyrics to which are "ooo-ee" and "rent is too damn high." You might think he at least sounds focused, but the site covers a broad range of topics, including the time McMillan climbed the Brooklyn Bridge and warded off policemen with a "Rambo-style combat knife." It even touches on his disappointment with the war on terror, which he almost prevented by uncovering a plot involving "Al Quida" and some Orthodox Jews. "If someone would have only listened," he laments on the site. I have never been this excited about a political candidate.
This brings us to the two reasons you should vote. First, voting for a crazy knife-wielding conspiracy theorist would be funny. Second, someone has to try to counteract most of America. Columbia students generally know what's going on in the world and have the capacity for understanding it, legacy admissions excepted of course. We have an obligation to make as many votes useless as possible by neutralizing them with our own. If voting is truly a sacred duty, then we must keep it out of the hands of all these idiots, or at least send enough thinking people to the polls to silence those with whom we disagree.
This Tuesday, do your patriotic duty, and encourage as many people to stay home as possible. Then sneak out a window and vote while they're watching black people arm-wrestle white people on Survivor. We don't want to look back on high voter turnout and think what might have been if someone would have only listened.
J.D. Porter is a Columbia College junior majoring in English. The Lion's Roar runs alternate Fridays.