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| Thank You for Not Voting |  |
By Catherine Seipp
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 23, 2004
I
asked the Smoking Gun folks what Affleck's reaction was to that. "We
get this email from the spokesman," the site's co-founder Daniel Green
responded, "and he says something like, 'Well, Ben tried to vote on
election year, but there was a snafu at the voting booth - a
bureaucratic snafu.' We said, 'The guy wasn't registered to vote! You
can't vote if you're not registered!'"
Voting is a privilege as
well as a right and if you don't vote, you should be ashamed of
yourself. But the reason you should be ashamed of yourself is that not
voting is lazy and idiotic. Should the lazy idiot constituency be
encouraged to influence society even more than it already does? This is
the paradox (and the problem) that hangs over these do-gooder media
campaigns to get out the youth vote, which heat up every election year.
But I don't see how the crotch-grabbing antics that now seem integral
to the Viacom brand encourage an informed electorate. You can lead a
horse to water, but you can't make him turn off the MTV.
Thomas
E. Patterson, who heads Harvard's The Vanishing Voter project and has
also written a book based on his research, acknowledges that a big
factor in low voter turnout is today's dumbed-down populace: "The
high-school-educated public of 1948," he writes, "knew as much about
Harry Truman's and Thomas Dewey's positions on price controls and the
Taft-Hartley Act as the media-saturated, college-educated public of
2000 knew about Gore's and Bush's stands on prescription drugs and tax
cuts." Although Patterson wants people to be more knowledgable, one of
his complaints is that political campaigns (and their ensuing press
coverage) numb potential voters by starting too early and going on too
long. But is the problem really too much information? "We're not
setting the agenda, but I think we have to respond to it," said CBS
news president Andrew Heyward when I asked about this. "I certainly
don't think any of the networks have been guilty of hyping election
coverage."
Patterson does approve of NPR's sober, unsensational
political coverage. But while I myself am a loyal NPR listener, I find
their earnest messages about voting just as smarmy as those from J-Lo
and her pals. A few days before the 2002 mid-term elections, for
instance, I caught an NPR story about a high-school teacher trying to
convince students that, yes, political issues do affect them and their
little lives. Here was her rather desparate argument: They like to talk
on cell phones in the car, right? Well, some legislators are trying to
ban that! Which would put a real cramp in their driving style. Ergo,
their votes matter.
Now maybe talking on cell phones while
driving should be banned and maybe it shouldn't, but implying that's
it's OK to vote strictly according to your own personal concerns is
deeply irresponsible. Unless you're old enough to at least consider the
other side of any argument, to think about the costs or benefits to
society instead of just how it affects you personally, you are not yet
old enough to vote and good for you if you realize this. A history
teacher is the last person who ought to suggest otherwise.
Although
Patterson admits that "in most locations, it takes about as long to
drive to a video store and rent a couple of movies" as it does to vote,
he's bought into the theory of increasing voter turnout by coddling.
Taken to the logical extreme, his solutions -- making Election Day a
national holiday and allowing people to register at the last minute,
eliminating the Electoral College, shortening campaigns, keeping polls
open even longer -- might include assigning government workers the task
of physically carrying citizens to voting booths and then singing them
to sleep that night with politically informed lullabies.
"Politics
as usual," wrestler and former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura once
complained, "continues to neglect young people and their concerns." The
current slogan of Ventura's friends at World Wrestling Entertainment
and its Smackdown Your Vote campaign is Two Million More in 2004. With
all due respect to the beer-can-on-the-head demographic "Jesse the
Body" and the WWE want to see flooding the polls, my two big
concerns when I first voted at age 19 were boys and makeup. I'm not
convinced the Republic would have been better served had the media
catered to my interests even more than it already did.
Celebrity
opinions about why we should vote are equally adolescent. "We
ultimately aren't celebrating democracy here," Madonna said on the Rock
the Vote website a few months ago. "Anybody who has anything to say
agains the war or against the president or whatever is punished."
Punished? How? And for speaking out against the war and the president
or for just, you know, whatever?
You may recall that Madonna got
a lot of grief when she draped herself in an American flag for a Rock
the Vote ad, urging fans to vote even though it turned out she herself
had never bothered. But although you could call her silly and careless
for that lapse, it's probably unfair to call her - or Ben Affleck -
irresponsbile. As those who saw Truth or Dare may remember, Madonna's
understanding of politics is so limited that she considers Canada a
fascist country. Why should she vote?
Let's hand it to the
18-to-30-year-old set: They do seem responsible enough to know when
their deep ignorance of the issues means they should stay home on
election day. So to them I say: Thank you for not voting. Because one
of the rights in a free society is the right to be stupid, and I wonder
how the nation is better off when people who don't read newspapers are
encouraged by their TV sets (via all these nannyish public service
announcements) to start acting as if they're making an educated choice.
In the eternal words of Marge on The Simpsons, "One person can make a difference. But most of the time they probably shouldn't."
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