State’s rights be damned: if the machines don’t work, the system doesn’t work. I hate to break it to you, buteven considering how difficult it is to negotiate this kind of thing between two different parties, and allif America cannot make sure that there are decent, working machines in every county in the country, then the myth of America’s love of democracy is a goddamned sham. Put your money where your mouth is, Washington.
And hey, States: quit clinging to this fake “rights” crap. It’s a pathetic excuse for all kinds of rigging, all kinds of mediocrity.
I’ve written before that, if democracy is the highest good in America, there should be pristine Halls of Democracy in every city in the country, to which citizens go together to perform their sacred duties, not just during elections but year round, debating those issues and studying them. Those buildings would have machines to be used for voting, machines constructed to be safe from tampering, to be foolproof against jiggering and hacking, and to be checked regularly, and in unison, by both partisan and nonpartisan officials.
I mean, with all the energy put into shopping malls, which exist for the lesser good of making money and having handy crap for people to buy all in one place, you’d think America could slap together enough incentive to at least be as dedicated to housing and nurturing democracy. You’d think that, if you believed the talk about safeguarding democracy elsewhere.
But I do have my doubts whether anyone with decision-making power, left or right, believes in democracy at all. Maybe it’s other temples that the masses are thinking of, too. Oh God. Can it be that we’re doomed for their stupidities? No rapture is coming. If we wipe ourselves, we’ll be met only by the cold silence of the universe, no triumph. We’ll be faced with the awful silence which could, if we’d had a little more wisdom, been filled by the voices of our descendants.
Perhaps I wax too dramatic. The end is none too soon. But if we’re to step past this crap, and into the future, it would do us well to see what is real, and what is false. If those who speak in hished tones of the Rapture are pathetically deluded, at least they are not purposefully deceitful. The lip service to democracy, and the idea that Left and Right (or their equivalents in other nations) pursue it, represent it, and serve it is something we need to discard, as well.
As for other machinations, even though I think there’s nothing protecting us from it happening, this is still amusing and clever as a form of protest.