Mike's Election Guide (12 page)

Then one day in school, while pondering the relic bones of the patron saint of floor enamel, I came up with a solution to this conundrum. But first, a little history.

Far from it being some sort of loyalty oath invented by witch hunters looking to round up the rebellious heathens, the Pledge of Allegiance was in fact written by an American socialist, Francis Bellamy, in 1892. Bellamy was also a Baptist minister. He preached radical sermons like “Jesus, the Socialist.” He was a deep believer and supporter of his cousin, Edward Bellamy, who wrote
Looking Backward,
a socialist utopian novel describing the 21st century as a workers’ paradise in which people earn equal pay, work reduced hours, and retire early with benefits. It was one of the most popular American novels of its time, selling more than a million copies.

Francis Bellamy believed that good citizenship in a true democracy was the best way to emulate what Jesus preached. Bellamy had the Pledge published in
The Youth’s Companion,
a popular children’s magazine at the time. He asked President Benjamin Harrison to issue a proclamation in favor of the Pledge, and on Columbus Day, 1892, 12 million school children across America recited the Pledge in school.

This was the original wording of the Pledge:

“I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Not bad, simple, to the point. But like all good ideas, some people just can’t leave well enough alone. In 1924, “my flag” was replaced with “the flag of the United States of America.” Then schools began requiring all students to recite the Pledge every day—and those who didn’t were often punished (the perfect way to encourage love of one’s country).

But in 1943, the Supreme Court ruled that forcing everyone to recite the Pledge was unconstitutional and that students could opt out of saying it.

In 1954, though, at the height of the Commie scare, the Knights of Columbus and other religious groups got Congress to add the words “under God” so as to distinguish America from all those godless communist countries. The new improved Pledge, which remains to this day, thus went: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

It is now more than 50 years later, with a lot of who we are and what we’ve done that’s flowed under the bridge. Over 80 percent of our nation now thinks the country is “on the wrong track.” More than half of the world’s citizens do not hold us in high esteem. Something needs to change.

Let’s start with a new Pledge of Allegiance for the 21st century. It would go like this:

“I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE
PEOPLE
OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND TO THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH WE STAND, ONE NATION, PART OF ONE WORLD, WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL.”

Not bad, eh? Kinder, gentler, and in recognition that we are in the same boat with everyone else on this planet.

And let’s leave it up to God if He wants to bless us. It really is His call—one I’m sure He’ll make based on our behavior—isn’t it?

10. Free HBO for Everyone!

If the new president would like to do just one thing to make everyone’s life a bit happier, he could pick up the tab for every household to get free HBO.

Let’s face it, TV is dead. It has become truly unwatchable. Other than a couple of comedies on NBC (
The Office, 30 Rock
), a couple of dramas on ABC, and the 11pm hour on Comedy Central, the rest of the week seems like it was written by guys who eat their lunch in the crapper. The sitcoms are so stale they will soon become like vaudeville. (“What’s vaudeville?” Exactly.) Extinct.

This is not to say that there are not informative shows on all those cable channels up in the triple digits. I’ve learned where to find the best feather pillows on HGTV, how to handle our dog when she is filled with anxiety on
The Dog Whisperer,
and how to hem a dress quickly should I ever end up on
Project Runway.

But by and large, it would do us all a world of good to turn the damn thing off and go for a walk. Or have a conversation with a friend. Or do some laundry. Or learn to play the viola.

Of course, most of the younger generation has already turned it off and moved across the room to a smaller screen that is both a wealth of egalitarian information AND a brand new crap machine of time-killing, mind-numbing nothingness.

In the landscape of all this noise, there still remains an oasis of keen and hip smarts, a place where they never have to worry about offending a sponsor or a government oversight panel. That place, as you know, is called HBO.

On top of showing movies uncut and uncensored with no commercial breaks, HBO has produced some of the finest television in recent memory.
The Sopranos
was like the greatest of novels—a work of modern literature—and if there could be a Nobel Prize for such an effort, this show deserved it. The other HBO dramas were/are of near-equal brilliance:
Six Feet Under, The Wire, Big Love,
even
Rome
was cool and sexy and weird. The comedies, too, are great: Larry David’s
Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage, Extras, Sex and the City
—the list goes on and on.

HBO should be free and made available to every American. (Or at least to me for giving them this unsolicited plug.)

HBO is proof that we can still do some things right as Americans. Its existence says that we are not afraid to take risks, that we are in fact NOT a nation of idiots. Thirty million of our 110 million households already have it. Let’s bring the rest of our fellow citizens in on the fun and the smarts.

FREE HBO! GOD BLESS AMERICA!!

4

Six Modest Proposals to Fix Our Broken Elections

As we all know, there was no better proof of how messed up our electoral system is than when the man who got the most popular votes in 2000 (and the most
electoral
votes, had all the votes in Florida been counted) did not become the president of the United States. It was a smackdown of epic proportions to our Democracy, and one from which it hasn’t recovered.

Since then, the move to electronic voting machines has only made it worse. Experts estimate that 10 percent of those machines fail at least once in each election.

Voting turnout in the U.S. remains among the lowest of all Western democracies (even though there has been a nice bump this year, thanks to the close race on the Democratic side).

And at the root of it all lies the money. No matter how many reforms have been tried,no matter how you try to color it, money rules the day. Even though the vast majority of Barack Obama’s funds have come from small donors, when he first started running in 2007, the only way he could launch his long-shot candidacy was to depend on the money of rich people. Fifty-four percent of his funds in 2007 came from people who gave $1,000 or more.

The worst of all of this is that the campaign season, which used to be confined to six grueling months, has now expanded to two bone-crushing, mind-altering, soul-sucking years of our lives. Two dozen debates, hundreds of pundits run amok, the same exact speech given in every single city. Have mercy on us!

This has to stop. And it can. In some very simple, easy ways, we can spend less time, less money, and have
more
say in our future.

Thus, here are my Six Modest Proposals to Fix Our Broken Elections:

1. Hold All Elections on the Weekend.

Upset that you have to work 100 hours a week at your two jobs and just can’t find the time to vote? Ever wonder why our leaders still think a work day is a good day for people to vote? Maybe so that not too many of those “workers” show up? The people in charge aren’t stupid—if they made it too easy for the working class to vote, God knows what would happen. What if we had our elections on a Saturday or a Sunday? Well, nearly everyone might vote.

Those who have an easier time taking off to go and vote whenever they damn well please are the same people who have a vested interest in making sure those with unnecessary grievances—the poor, the uninsured, those whose kids go to substandard schools—don’t flood the polling places on election day.

The United States of America ranks #139 in voter turnout of countries that have held elections since 1945. We Americans like to be #1 at everything—but #139?!

I was wondering, just how do these other countries get a bigger turnout? One of the reasons is that many of them hold their elections on a Saturday or Sunday. Check it out:

So my first proposal is that our national election day is changed from the first Tuesday in November to the first Sunday of November. That should guarantee a bigger turnout and thus our Congress and the President will be more representative of the whole country. The only reason why we vote on Tuesdays in November is because when this tradition began in 1845, it was the most convenient time for farmers to vote. It was timed for after the fall harvest and on a Tuesday because Monday was needed as a travel day to get to the polls. In other words, they set up our original elections to occur when it was least likely the majority of people would be working!

Well, times have changed, Tuesday’s a work day, so let’s move our election day to the weekend. It’s already been proposed in Congress; Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin has introduced the Weekend Voting Act to Congress in 1997, 2001, 2005, and again this year. All we need is some presidential leadership to get this moving. President Obama?

2. Every Citizen Is Automatically a Registered Voter.

I was once talking to a Canadian friend before an election there, and I wanted to know whether the party he favored had a chance of winning. I asked how their voter registration drives were going and if they were gonna turn out a big vote. He looked at me as if I were asking him to show me his handgun.

“Uh, voter registration drive?” he asked.

“Yeah. You gotta register new voters and young people if you want to have a chance of winning,” I explained. “Aren’t you canvassing, going door-to-door, registering students, holding house parties, going to nursing homes . . . ?”

“You do all that just to REGISTER voters?” he asked me. “That’s a waste of time and money, eh?”

“I guess. But you have to do it if you want to win elections.”

My Canadian friend explained to me that they too, at one point, had a time-consuming, money-wasting system that ended up leaving far too many voters off the election rolls.

Rather than blowing all that time and money only to end up falling short and leaving some voters unregistered, they created a federal database that eliminated the need to go though all that mess.

It was then that my Canadian friend hit me with some more humbling news. “Most Western democracies have systems like this. As a matter of fact, most democracies have universal voter registration. The requirement for being registered to vote is just being born. Your birth certificate is, in essence, your automatic Voter I.D. card. But you don’t take your birth certificate with you when you vote. You just show up and they look you up in the federal database of people who were born in Canada. So let’s say you’ve moved recently. Or you’ve been out of the country for a few years. Or you haven’t voted in a long time. Doesn’t matter. You just show up at the polls. They have your name.

“That way, I guess you could say our voter registration is 100 percent!”

I inquired how this was possible. “You mean you don’t have to stand in line at the city clerk or driver’s license place to register to vote? By the simple fact that you were born in your country, this automatically makes you a registered voter 18 years later?”

“Yup.”

Of course, my American mind goes right to the “what if” worst-case scenario.

“What about voter fraud? People going to different towns and voting more than once?”

“Is that your problem?” the Canadian asked me. “People voting
too much?
Isn’t your problem that you can’t get Americans to vote in the first place? It seems like it’s hard enough to get your countrymen to even vote
once
, let alone finding Americans who would devote that kind of energy and gas money to traveling all over hell’s half acre just to vote again and again!”

The Canadian was right. Why do we make people jump through hoops just so they can vote? You don’t have to go sign up somewhere for the privilege of paying taxes, do you? If you work, you pay taxes. You don’t have to go stand in line and fill out a form for the right to drink alcohol at age 21, do you? On your 21st birthday, you can legally drink. You don’t have to prove you have been living at a certain address. If you want to have a baby, you don’t have to register with any government official. You don’t have to show any papers or be responsible in any way. You just have to take off some of your clothes and make sure your partner is of the other gender (unless you want to be artificially inseminated, then you can skip getting all sweaty having to listen to him mispronounce your name).