The California political system is fast becoming so entertaining
that it threatens to take viewers away from the highly-expensive,
elaborately hyped crappy new television shows the networks are
about to unload on us. I mean,
”
circus
”
is no longer an adequate description.
The California political system is fast becoming so entertaining that it threatens to take viewers away from the highly-expensive, elaborately hyped crappy new television shows the networks are about to unload on us. I mean, “circus” is no longer an adequate description.
OK, so in what had been the center of attention we have a roster of gubernatorial candidates approximately equal to the population of Carmel, which alone could provide more docu-comedy than George Bush trying to explain why the solution to America’s antiquated power grid is another tax cut for millionaires (short answer: the solution to EVERYTHING is another tax cut for millionaires).
But now we have a whole new reality show based on the mechanics of the election. We have a local Federal judge temporarily freezing the absentee ballot process while he investigates whether the quickie changes in ballots and polling places and such occasioned by the ill thought-out recall scheme is discriminatory. We have another lawsuit challenging the October date for the election on the grounds that we should wait until Spring when more modern voting machines are in place instead of the hanging chad-infested old geezers still in service in many districts.
And to make the series a sure-fire Emmy nominee we have a whole new brouhaha (God, I love that word) over a study that says the next generation of voting machines, the ones we should supposedly be switching to with touch-screens, are so poorly programmed that any hacker who can spell “hacker” could get into the system to vote multiple times or delete information. Comparisons are made to the 2000 presidential election in Florida, except since computers are involved, it could be of course many times worse. One thing you gotta say about computers, whenever they do something, be it good or bad, they do a lot of it.
The nagging, insidious, thoroughly demoralizing suspicion that we have inadvertently set ourselves on an unalterable course to chaos is beginning to flex its muscles. Even assuming the vote discloses a reasonably clear winner, will the vote have been fair to the voters? Will it have been free of electronic fraud? How will we know?
Brace yourselves, here comes the giant-killer, the one you can see coming an ugly mile away: the election will be decided by the courts, again. It is far from beyond the range of possibility that the identical nine entities who elected the last president of the United States will elect the next governor of California. Doesn’t that thought just make you want to turn to drugs?
One begins to wonder if it is possible to conduct a truly fair and honest election. Maybe there’s no such thing; maybe every close election is really a crap-shoot on the question of whether the declared winner really won. Perhaps the course of American history has been determined by one hanging chad after another, and all this concern over universal fairness and electronic inviolability is just a hopeless attempt to turn a pig into a prom queen.
Even if that’s so, then the upcoming two-month episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Sow is bound to keep Jay Leno in material for life. Just please God, no matter how we end up picking a governor, whether it’s by casting runes or examining chicken entrails, don’t give it to the Supreme Court. Once is quite enough, thank you.
