Real Americans Vote - weekly column 10.24.19

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Real Americans Vote

In my rural county the ballot is still paper but the gadget nerds in Austin have electrified the rest of the process – one’s driving license (“or other approved form of i.d.”) is scanned by a robotic eye, which issues a paper permission slip to the nice lady behind the table who then hands the paper permission slip to the voter. The voter carries the paper permission slip maybe three feet along the same table to another nice who takes the paper permission slip. The voter then signs a telescreen with a magic stylus. After this, the voter chooses from among three ballots, is issued a special blue plastic pen (“Be sure to return it”), and withdraws into a large space to sit at any of dozens of little desks to hide behind a folding cardboard screen (printed in patriotic colors).

After marking his ballot the voter carries it (“Be sure not to fold your ballot”) to a zippered plastic fiber box which looks like it might have begun life as a beer cooler and slides it in. Everyone thanks everyone else and the exercise in democracy is over.

Still, the creeping computerization of elections is frightening. Remember the onboard computers that brought down airplanes and killed hundreds of people this summer, sacrificed to the demon idol Progress.

Paper ballots are scanned by electro-mechanical machines, and that’s fine. Doubtful ballots are evaluated by committees and a decision is made. Corrupting a paper ballot can be done (as the ghost of Lyndon Johnson could tell you), but it requires a conspiracy of traitors who must fudge one ballot at a time.

But millions of electronic ballots can be corrupted at one time by one sullen, resentful little mansie who can’t get a date but has Learned. To. Code. That’s how we see it written, this magic incantation that will feed the poor and make the lame walk again: Learn. To. Code.

Learn. To. Code. worked so well for the airplanes and the people who went down with them.

Let’s keep the paper ballots. If bad people are going to change our votes, make them work at it. As the ghost of Lyndon Johnson could tell you.

As with all elections, this is an important one, with ten proposed constitutional amendments (our constitution dates from just after Reconstruction and is a clumsy mess) that must be addressed. Locally there are no other issues, but in a few other counties and precincts there are also special races to fill empty offices and resolve certain county and precinct issues.

The Texas Tribune (https://www.texastribune.org/2019/10/15/texas-2019-constitutional-amendments-what-voters-need-know/) offers the best discourse on those ten proposed amendment, including the complete wording and a reasoned discussion which attempts objectivity and which does not tell the citizen how to vote. A certain area daily newspaper, on the other paw, features only truncated wording, and offers questionable recommendations, including a suggestion that a state income tax might be a good idea and should not be left to the voters to decide.

Pitching hissy-fits on the Intergossip is irrelevant. We must think and vote.

Self-government is not a spectator sport.

-30-

Texas French New Wave Voting

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Texas French New Wave Voting

To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.

- Louis L'Amour (www.lifequoteslib.com/authors/louis_l_amour)

Voting in Texas remains a lonely experience.

The new state requirement for an identification card with a photograph in order to vote was regarded by many as a solution to illegal voting by wild hordes of Those People. Others opposed the requirement as an attempt by meanies to suppress poor but honest Tom Joad just struggling day-to-day to scratch a living out of his new wide-screen television.

In the event, neither Tom Joad nor many other folks voted on state constitutional amendments last week. Perhaps Tom was too busy listening to the fat boys on A.M. radio to drive his Model A Ford to the polls (why do we call them polls?) while carrying his Texas driving license with his photograph on it.

Texas citizens who wish to withdraw from the noise and busy-ness and demands of job, family, and society for a day of solitude need not resort to a monastic retreat; they can volunteer to serve as election judges or poll watchers. As a polling official one can meditate upon the mysteries of the Rosary, read Keats’ Endymion, knit sweaters for the grandchildren, or write another chapter of that still unfinished book, all in perfect peace and quiet. The only sounds will be the air-conditioning cycling on and off and perhaps a fellow official making a fresh pot of coffee. Even the Desert Fathers would envy voting officials in Texas their solitude.

Similarly, a Texan who wants only a few minutes alone can do so by voting.

Imagine voting in Texas as a scene from an art-house movie – sorry, film; “movie” is so plebeian – in grainy black-and-white: the wind sighs across a desolate landscape as the camera pans slowly from empty prairie to an apparently abandoned town. Cue the tumbleweeds. Close-up of an unpainted, sun-weathered wooden front. Offscreen, footsteps are heard on the gravel. Since the auteur is influenced by French New Wave, this goes on for a long, long time. This is, like, y’know, art, and, like, stuff. Film, not movie. Finally, the unseen steps pause, and a hand reaches for the doorknob. After a long pause the hand pushes the door open. The rusty hinges squeak, and old spider webs, long still, are disturbed by the moving air. The camera, assuming the point-of-view of the still-unseen owner of the hand, moves into a room whose darkness is intermittently broken by shafts of light from the windows. This could be symbolic of the protagonist’s internal conflict between good and evil, or it could reflect the fact that the filmmaker has seen High Noon too many times. To the viewer’s right, shadows resolve themselves into people sitting silently in chairs. Do they symbolize Death (think Ingmar Bergman)? Do they symbolize Redemption-with-a-capital-R? Do they symbolize the bourgeoisie? Do they symbolize bureaucratic / hierarchic obscurantism as in Franz Kafka’s Das Schloss? Does their silence symbolize existential despair? No, they’re the election officials, and their brief silence reflects only their surprise that a Texan showed up to vote.

-30-

Primary Runoffs - Casting a Vote

Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Midsummer Primary Runoffs -

Casting a Vote

Well, no, one does not exactly cast a vote -
The petitioner presents his papers,
And the County Mothers pince-nez them
As the countenance of ‘Way Cool Jesus
Beams down upon all from the cinder-block wall
Of the youthatorium, focused on
The holy liturgical percussion-set,
Now sacrally stilled in a Lenten silence.
The beldams rubber-stamp democracy,
And, humbly honored by their Nihil Obstat,
The citizen communes with a party ballot,
Ignoring the glares of disapproval
From one set of partisan poll-watchers  
And ignoring too the approbation
Of another shoal of lapel-flagged bluehairs,
He sits in pontifical dignity
On the folding cathedra of wisdom,
At the cafeteria table of justice,
Rood-screened in occultus by cardboard sheets
(Bearing flags thereon, and symbols arcane),
And blots with The Sacred Pen of Our People
Little squares illuminating holy texts.
He frowns, recalling in indignation
Intrusive ‘phone calls from a candidate:
“Suspendatur,” he thinks, and then moves on,
Blotting, blotting away into history,
“Here, sir, the blotters rule.”  And then The Box:
The Blue Box or the Red; the Red Box or the Blue;
The Ballot, unfolded, face up, must be
Not cast but slid, like a speakeasy tip,
Gently, into The Box, The People’s Box.
Not cast, but slid, carefully, and then
In November one does this again.

Weak Tea

Mack Hall


The Boston Tea Party of 1773 is said to have been a reasonable protest against taxation without representation. The English view is that after 150 years it was about time for the colonies to stop being a drag on the English economy and to start helping pay for their own maintenance and defense.

The tea parties of 2009 are less defensible, except for the environmental matter – the tea this year was drunk, not dumped into a harbor to pollute the little fishies. The reality is that our contemporary tea parties are not about lack of representation but rather about folks (wearing clothes made in slave-labor camps in the Far East) throwing polite hissy-fits for getting exactly the government for which they voted.

Or maybe the government for which they did not vote at all.

Indeed, if the one requirement for participation in a Taxed Enough Already Tea Party were the possession of an I-voted-last-November voter card, how many people could have shown up?

Under the kings the theory is that the hierarchy of power is from God to the Christian monarch to the people. Under a republic the usual hierarchy of power is from the people to their elected rulers, and there is no God. In our Republic the general idea has been that power is given by God to the people, who then prayerfully and thoughtfully elect their leaders, which explains the saintly Ted Kennedy, who once walked on water.

Unfortunately most Americans don’t vote. Some can’t, because of youth, mental incompetence, or felony conviction (which doesn’t apply to Rush Limbaugh with his illegal drug issues, because he’s special and you’re not). Of the rest, many don’t bother to register, and of those who register, only about half ever vote. One fears they are too busy obediently listening to Glenn Beck yell at them.

A protest against a federal government that was empowered by democratic vote only four months before seems to be pretty weak tea. Similarly, sitting around over coffee (or tea) and belly-aching about the state government, the county government, the city government, or the school board unless the belly-acher actually voted in those elections is an exercise of the absolute freedom to be a gaseous phony.

Historical minutiae of no particular importance:

1. George Washington was the 11th President, not the first. After independence from perfidious Albion, this country functioned (badly) under the Articles of Confederation. The argument that the first ten presidents were leaders of Congress, not of the Confederation, won’t brew.

2. The United States government has in the past sent the United States Army to shoot and hang tax protestors, beginning with Shay’s Rebellion and The Whiskey Rebellion. Being shot might have been a lesser punishment than having to endure that princess CNN reporter.

3. The first President (I capitalize the noun because of my deep respect for the office) born in the United States was Martin Van Buren. The ten Presidents under the Articles of Confederation were all born in English colonies, as were eight of the first nine Presidents under the Constitution. If the concept that an American President must be American born is valid, then the first President is Van Buren and the second is John Tyler, all those preceding being invalid.

4. The final irony about any American tea party is that very little tea is grown here; most tea consumed in America is grown in over forty countries in Asia and Africa, and imported mostly by English companies.

And, hey, how about that balance of trade with Communist China, eh?