on the equilibrium of a chaotic political system…

(I did a short rant earlier that monkey587 noted was under 1000 words. I told him don’t worry, that was just the warm-up. I was just getting started)

So I think I’ve made it pretty clear over time that I am no so much with the sanity. At the very least I have pretty, lets say unique, political ideas. Ok, frankly I’m an embittered asshole with a chip on his shoulder and a slightly delusional neurosis, but I’m a person to. Prick me, do I not bleed? Sure, I may bleed at the 0.25% BA level, but its blood, dammit. Anyway, maybe I am nuts, but that just makes me interesting right? We have an election coming up in a couple weeks, and since the rest of Blogdom Assembled has been ranting about it, I’ve been pretty quiet. Well, enough of that here are some of my antipartisan thoughts I’ve been having on the whole thing in the last couple of days bitterly tossed together in the format I like to call 1000 words of free flowing hostility:

Given my unique politics, I’ve complained for years about our election system. Not just the Electoral College, which its pretty en vogue to complain about these days, but also my disdain for the two-party system. I’ve exclaimed with pride that I have in twelve years of voting not once voted for a presidential candidate who had an icicle in Muspelheim’s chance of winning second prize in a beauty contest much the presidency. My reasoning being that by doing so one day someone would do well enough that the rest of the nation would realize there’s other viable third-party candidates to elect. It doesn’t have to be a Democrat or Republican. Back in the day we had presidents that were Federalists, and Whigs and even fucking Bullmooses. People said I was throwing away my vote, but I say I was fighting the good fight. Power to the people!

Who cares if I throw away my vote anyway? It’s my fucking vote. I’ll wipe my ass with it if I please. Whoever said that every vote counts anyway? It doesn’t. That’s why we have an electoral college. That’s the whole damn point. Every vote isn’t supposed to count. We aggregate the votes such that your vote doesn’t so much count as much as the group mentality. And then we aggregate those votes and we get the group mentality of the country. And that’s how we pick a president.

Anyway, about four years ago, the impossible happened. We had a tie. Spare me the liberal or conservative rhetoric about who really won. In the Electoral College, the Florida vote and even the nationwide popular election, Gore and Bush had a statistical tie. I joked with people after Election Day that the democracy had finally failed us; it was time to raise the militia. ¡Vive le revolution! Power to the People! But the truth was the American people had spoken. When it came down to Al Gore versus George W. Bush they simply didn’t care. If anything, they were mildly annoyed that those assholes were preempting the West Wing for this political bullshit.

And that’s what it comes down to. I don’t think it’s simply the case that no third-party candidate can actually win the election. It’s deeper than that. America as a whole simply doesn’t give a damn about who the president is anymore. Seriously, we just don’t care. I don’t feel like looking it up right now, but if I remember correctly, only about 50% population voted. That means that of all the people who profess they care enough about who our country’s leaders are to say “yeah, sure I’ll be a registered voter” when they get their driver’s license, only about half of them felt like getting up to actually make a choice between the two yahoos that they were supposed to choose between. That doesn’t even count any of the people who were turned away due to underhanded polling techniques, or who said “fuck this, I don’t even want to be registered,” or kids under 18 not old enough to vote. Half the people who are supposed to vote simply said, “Fuck this noise, I just don’t care.”

And the half that did vote, supposedly, the largest voter turnout percentage in several elections, they voted in a tie. I’ve been thinking about that a lot for the past few days. How did that happen? Well, I think I’m starting to understand it. People always talk about how the Interweb means that any blowhard who has half a brain and access to a computer (hey, like me, I have a computer and half a brain) can publish out his bonehead opinions for millions of people (well, 147) to read. The ready exchange of ideas at the press of a button. Gone are the days when Lincoln and Douglas would debate and people would wait for the Pony Express to come by and tell them how it went. No one reads the newspaper anymore. I mean, why? That was stuff that happened yesterday. I don’t even watch the 6 o’clock news when I come home from anymore because they’re talking about shit I found out from Google six hours ago. If something important happens in the world, be it Christopher Reeves dying or the president not knowing whether or not he owns a lumber company then, Jay-Zdammit, I’ll find out immediately when someone blogs about. My grandmother doesn’t even have a computer. She has CNN. It’s almost just as good.

So when we have instantaneous dissemination of information, an electoral college that forces not only every vote to not count and a two party system that forces a myriad of complex issues to essentially come down to a single binary choice what will happen? Science tells us that even the most complex systems eventually move towards equilibrium. I suggest that maybe that’s what we’ve done. People say that polling is useless for predicting the results of the modern election. But what is the election if not one giant poll?

I always say that the two-party system is wrong, well maybe not. Maybe it’s the natural final step before the one party system where America is finally at rest. Inert. Entropic. It turned out that communism, while a wonderful idea for a community of 200 broke down under scale that the USSR tried to apply it to. Maybe democracy has a scaling problem to. Maybe invading smaller countries and forcing them to adopt the system isn’t the right idea, not because they don’t deserve to be invaded but because we’re not sure democracy really works. Maybe I’m going to jail for treason for writing this. But hey, how about we give my idea a chance. I say if we have a tie this time, which I predict we just might, lets just appoint someone, I dunno, say me, supreme high lord commander for a trial period not to exceed, say, seventy years, and see how it goes.

God Bless America.