Voting

North Americans have to be the strangest people when it comes to voting. I don’t know whether it’s something in the water or breathing all that SUV exhaust but, since there is no ‘stupid voter’ gene that I know of, it can’t be genetic.

The rationale of western voting goes like this:
- Everybody knows that politicians lie.
- At election time, the electorate chooses the best liar.
- Everyone is astonished when the newly elected politicians renege on their promises.

Excuse me? This is right up there with the incredulity that people display when highly literate, sensitive males deprived of an outlet for sex by vows of celibacy, molest those in their care. How can a group of people who have led the world into the information age be so naïve? Are they (and I get to exclude myself because I’m the author of this missive) so trusting that they don’t believe the evidence that slaps them in the face every four years or so? Aren’t they the ‘don’t talk to strangers’ and ‘trust no one’ society?

So, if they’re not stupid and not naïve, then why do they fall for the lies and why do their offspring stay home from the polls in increasing numbers? I’ll put my money on television. Americans and Canadians are so conditioned to and by their brain-numbing medium that common sense and deductive reasoning are subjugated – hope and fear are manipulated to produce a desired outcome by those who have the resources to juggle the pixels.

It is, after all, television that acts as the arbiter of all that is good, right, and desirable in western society. We conveniently forget that television is an audio-visual cereal box which serves as a palette for advertising. We forget that the medium tells us little white lies so we will buy things that aren’t necessarily good for us, from people who want us to spend more than we can afford. We know that nobody’s bathtub ever gets that dirty, no shampoo will make us irresistible to the opposite sex, and finance companies will not get us out of debt, yet we continue to tune in and watch in mouth-breathing fascination. But television only lies to us for our own good, it is our ubiquitous advisor, and even lives with us for cripes sake.

Now the objection may be raised that there are other media that are involved in the promotion of politicians and their platforms, but how deeply do these influence the electorate? Newspapers? They’re just low tech cousins of the boob tube and besides, readership isn’t what it used to be. Public forums? Right. Who of you has been to one of those recently, if at all? Door knocking? Standing and waving on street corners?

Ray Bradbury saw it all coming in Fahrenheit 451. Although his focus was not the voting predilection of twenty-first century Canaricans (Canadian/Americans - I think I’ll copyright that word) but he had the media environment bang on with its ear-bud radios and big screen reality based television.

It’s a shame that my former school has stopped using 451 in novel study; the book is so instructive, not only on the dangers of censorship but also on the power of television as a social engineering device. Modern political/social hegemonies are far to savvy to follow the future painted by ‘1984’ of coercion and omnipresent government. The insidious numbing of the hive’s brain is much more effective at sublimating critical thought and ensuring that pivotal judgments of human will such as voting are relegated to popularity contests and Jerry Springer like scandal-fests.

The human spirit is not broken with blows but rather, tends to resist overt assaults; the human spirit, it seems, can only be broken by burden and sustained erosion. And you don’t have to look beyond your cathode ray tube/LCD of choice to find the erosive element. Whether you spend gobs of your time watching Bounty Hunter or eat dinner while Bones parades its putrefying corpses in front of you or even if you indulge in interactive viewing (like you’re doing as you read this) your little grey cells are marshalling themselves to establish congruence with the medium or just going the way of the lotus eaters and drifting off.

Burden? How much leisure time do we have compared to fifty years ago? How secure do you feel in a world that only kills ninety-nine percent of germs leaving the remaining one percent to repopulate your countertops as soon as your back is turned? How safe is your neighborhood (and your virtual neighborhood is, on some planes, more real than the one you actually live in) when people are robbed and raped and murdered right under your nose on a recurring basis. How would you like to be friends with Jessica Fletcher or live in Midsommer Mews?

So how does that relate to voting? In the world of passive ‘watchers’ the world is not something to participate in or act upon; rather, it is a process to be observed, evaluated and either accepted or rejected. The ideas of committing or risking or changing are part of the language of doers not watchers. Commitment to principals and ethics is all well and good, but do they come with a warranty and will they make me more attractive to my peers? Spectators don’t have a voice. They can show approval or disapproval at an outcome but are powerless to guide the forces that precipitated that outcome.

And feelings of powerlessness are at the root of the problem when it comes to voting. Empowerment and encouragement are the solution if you believe, as I do, that power and courage are the engines that drive social evolution. Unfortunately, the only salient power seems to be the 110 volts that run into the back of the television.

Happy Hanukkah