Taki's Mag

A legendarily brief standup performance by Seinfeld creator Larry David consisted of the eternally uneasy comedian walking onstage, slowly scrutinizing his audience, shaking his head, and saying, “No, I don’t think so” before abruptly leaving.

That was similar to my voting experience in 2008.

Like a nervous white shark, I circled my local polling station in DeKalb County, GA. Voters poured out of the red-brick grade school and wormed down the sidewalk for hundreds of yards. Georgia is about two-thirds white and leans Republican, so the balled-up-and-crusty used facial tissue named John McCain already had the state in his pocket. But DeKalb County is solidly black-Demo and has consistently elected race-hustling convicted reverse-discriminators such as Vernon Jones, Islamically funded and possibly insane commie vampire bats such as Cynthia McKinney, and intellectually handicapped Hep-C sufferers such as Hank Johnson. Being mathematically minded, I concluded that there was no chance my vote would have the slightest effect on the national, state, or local elections. So after scrutinizing the audience, I said, “No, I don’t think so,” and drove away.

I haven’t had much luck with voting. I’ve cast a ballot in five presidential elections but never picked a winner. To my knowledge, the only item for which I’ve ever successfully yanked the one-armed bandit was California’s Proposition 103 in 1988. That measure was intended to roll back state insurance rates by twenty percent, but vengeful lawmakers found a way to slalom around vox populi, and my insurance rates soon doubled.

In short, although I am reputedly a sandal-wearing member of an Athenian-style democracy and am thus a vibrant, throbbing, membrane-coated cell inhabiting the body politic, I’ve had zero say in how the government spends the money it’s been sucking from my veins since I entered our labor force as a humble, innocent buck in my mid-teens. Without so much as a mouth-fart of my consent, the government has stolen my lunch money for my entire life.

A predictable contingent of people, schooled in the sort of cheap slogans that ultimately get politicians elected, will chastise me for abandoning my civic duty and lecture me that if I don’t vote, I have no right to complain. What exactly is this “right to complain” of which you speak? What’s it worth if politicians aren’t required to listen to you, anyway?

Some might try to nudge me to at least vote for the lesser of two evils. I’m no stranger to evil, and like Christine O’Donnell, I may or may not have dabbled in witchcraft at some distant point in my youth, but I refuse to vote for any sort of evil, greater or lesser, that’s going to have power over my life. That doesn’t seem, I don’t know, very democratic to me.

American democracy’s pom-pom girls will dust off another bumper sticker and insist that every vote counts. That’s a cute idea, but according to one study of approximately sixteen thousand congressional elections, only one—in Buffalo a hundred years ago—was decided by a single vote. A person’s odds of casting the deciding vote in a presidential election is estimated to be around one in sixty million—about the same chance you have of being struck by lightning…twice.

Whether dimly or vividly aware that the odds are stacked against them, many eligible voters—sometimes a majority—vote not to vote. I get a creeping sense that many Americans take this route due to a learned helplessness accrued after decades of realizing that no matter how they vote, no one is listening to them.

Refusing to vote is one thing. Refusing to cooperate with the system whatsoever is the potentially dangerous next step.

American democracy might be more workable if “We the People” still had any sense of nationhood or common destiny. This “nation” is currently held together by spit and bubble gum, our only social adhesive being a strict demand that we celebrate that the only thing we have in common is the fact that we have nothing in common. Political debate is reduced to a shouting match between classes, tribes, and genders regarding who gets to eat which slice of the pie at whose expense.

There were fewer than four million Americans when the first US Census was tallied in 1790. There are now nearly 80 times as many masses huddling here. Each member of the House of Representatives is expected to adequately serve the needs of roughly 700 thousand individuals who step over one another like puppies in a cardboard box trying to make their voices heard.

The system isn’t too big to fail; it’s too big to work.

The main problem—and it’s enormous—is that while voting is voluntary, taxation is not. You may elect not to elect anyone, but you have no choice over the fact that you have to work four to five months every year merely to shovel coal inside the system’s insatiable mouth to keep it wheezing, belching, and chugging along. Despite the relentlessly propagated fiction that the government takes orders from me rather than vice-versa, I make no decisions in this process. Even worse, I am forced under threat of incarceration to pay whatever the fuck they tell me to pay. Therefore, I’m less than tickled about the idea that I’m awarded the “privilege” of having a roughly 50-50 chance in deciding who gets to decide things for me. I don’t quite deem it an honor being “allowed” to choose who gets to steal the fruits of my labor.

Over the past generation I’ve watched most of the nation’s manufacturing base dismantled, boxed, and shipped overseas while I had no say in the matter. I’ve been forced to fund large-scale foreign wars as I scrambled to pay the electric bill. I’ve seen the government do nothing as the nation’s southern border crumbled and at least a dozen million individuals who don’t speak my language and view me as a historical adversary have been welcomed, in large part at my expense. And due to toxic wastefulness from both major parties, my one-child family “owes” approximately $150,000 on the federal deficit, while we’ve at least been frugal enough that our personal debt is less than five Gs.

So I’m supposed to be happy, eat shit, keep playing the game, and pretend I’m not being used?

That’s simply not the way my guitar strings are strung. In the course of human events, it becomes necessary to stop rolling over and playing dead.

Still, I instinctually fear the taxman’s wrath so much that I’m self-defeatingly honest on my 1040s and always file them via Certified Mail to ensure there are no misunderstandings. Despite this, over the past year both the IRS and Georgia’s tax department have forced me to prove that I’ve already paid them with checks and money orders that they’ve already cashed. Both agencies have accused me of never sending specific checks and money orders, forcing me to spend time tracking down the canceled items, scanning the front and back, and sending my overlords proof, again by Certified Mail, that I actually already paid them via Certified Mail.

So not only am I forced to pay government workers’ bloated salaries, things have devolved to the point where I am also now forced to do their jobs for them.

It reminds me of jail. In Portland, the holding cells have electronically operated solid-wood doors rather than open-air steel bars. After your brief daily “walk time” outside of your cement crib, the guard pushes a button from his control tower to click open your cell door. You then walk inside your cell and are forced to close the door and lock yourself inside.

I’m fine with not voting. I’m not exactly fine with paying taxes, but I do it because the risks of noncompliance seem too high. But when the government’s ineptitude reaches a point where they can’t even keep basic records and force me to wipe their overpaid asses for them, suddenly I’m not so fine with the government at all.

Right now a lot of Obama voters—that ebulliently wacky, wired, juiced-up, energized coalition who in late 2008 finally started to feel that their votes could actually make a difference—are slowly awakening to the fact that their Chosen One is a calculating politician and not quite the American Moses they’d hoped he was. Amid his followers who aren’t completely afflicted with blind denial, there’s a growing bitter taste and sense of betrayal.

Also right now, the Tea Party is pulling off a string of electoral upsets, emboldening an entirely different demographic with the idea that their voices are able to shake the very columns upon which the system is built. Like the Obamatons before them, they seem dangerously confident that they will FINALLY be the ones who restore honesty to government.

If they also wind up feeling betrayed in a year or two, will a single soul remain who has any faith left in government? And if not, what happens then?

It’s hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for the government, seeing how it’s admittedly difficult to maintain a veneer of honesty when they print fake money to fund the whole fake-ass elephant-and-donkey show. And sure, both major parties are only shadow puppets of global finance, existing only to serve the whims of their elite masters. My main gripe about this is that I was never invited to join the elite.

But basic behavioral psychology dictates that if the dog gets no treat for pulling the lever, sooner or later the dog will stop pulling it. And if the only reward for abject obedience is not being punished, the dog may, for freedom’s sake, sooner or later find a way to turn on its master.

Sooner or later one tends to develop a distaste for being bullied. If you’re still even remotely alive inside, it makes you sick to continue in blind compliance. When it comes to doing anything to support a system that has done nothing to support me, I feel driven to the point where I’ll emulate Bartleby the Scrivener and issue a terse “I would prefer not to.”

After a while, it doesn’t become a question of deciding whether to throw the bums out as much as it involves deciding whether to burn down the bums’ house.

Whatever their political leanings and regardless of whether they’d admit it, I suspect most Americans fear the government. In a healthy democracy, the government would fear the people. At the very least, I believe they should share in the fear.

Fear is the only government handout I’ve ever accepted, albeit grudgingly. The time is ripe—it’s almost rotten—to give it back. I don’t pretend to offer any solutions regarding how to lift the USA out of its faux-democratic quagmire. I suspect things probably need to get far worse before they have a chance of getting better. But I don’t think it’s unethical to suggest that the government should fear its citizens at least as much as we fear them.

If they see nothing wrong with refusing to play fair with us, then I see nothing wrong with refusing to play with them at all.