“Hey dude!”
“What?”
“I got good news and bad news about that mask you got on.”
“What’s the good news?”
“It’s really scary. Great for Hallowe’en.”
“I told you that the Dick Cheney was still a top seller. What’s the bad news?”
“Hallowe’en was yesterday.”
“No it ain’t. It’s tomorrow.”
“Dude. Tomorrow’s Election Day!”
“An’ that’s different from Hallowe’en how?”
“You ain’t s’posed to run around scarin’ people at the votin’ booths, dude!”
“Why? ‘Cause the ballot’s already scary enough?”
“You will be votin’, won’t you?”
“Dam right I will. With my feet! Take ’em to the beach to stare at the surf, or tie a kite string to ’em so I can fly one in the rain, or do somethin’ else that might make a difference. Votin’ sure won’t.”
“But, dude! Ain’t you proud to be an American? What about your civic duty?”
“Spell that.”
“S … I …”
“Thought so. Civic, schmivic, dude. Lemme tell you how proud I am to be an American. We live in Washington state, right?”
“Yeah?”
“The state’s broke, right? Tryin’ to pay for all the things that its citizens have been insistin’ that it pay for, right?”
“Yeah?”
“How’s it gonna do that?”
“Bake sales?”
“Taxes, dude. That an’ borrowin’ money, which it mostly don’t have the credit ratin’ to do no more.”
“What’s a credit ratin’?”
“The number that’s turnin’ all those geniuses with ‘free credit report’ websites into billionaires, dude, while we eat ramen. So after a lot o’ shakin’ an’ bakin’, the state finally comes up with a tax that they could actually pass, one on soda an’ candy an’ stuff. Lots o’ people will pay an extra nickel for a Coke, an’ those that can’t shouldn’t oughta be drinkin’ it anyway. Everybody’s happy but the people who make the candy ‘n’ stuff. So they get an initiative on this frickin’ ballot that you’re so hepped up about, to get rid of the tax. An’ they pour millions of dollars into an ad campaign supportin’ the initiative. An’ you know what’s happenin’?”
“The voters saw through the special interest campaign an’ support the tax?”
“You’re wrong, dude. The smart money says the initiative is likely to pass, and the tax will be repealed, putting a new $200 million dollar hole in the state budget.
“There’s another initiative, to put an income tax on the people who can actually afford to pay one. Needless to say, the fat cats ain’t happy, an’ they’re fightin’ it hard as they can. An’ the initiative is gonna lose.
“The yachties put one on the ballot that they actually like, to insist that the state legislature have a 2/3 majority to pass any new taxes. Which means that they won’t ever be able to pass a tax again, an’ you may as well sign the whole state over to the Feudal Empire of Microsoft now. Needless to say, that initiative is projected to pass.”
“Ain’t nobody payin’ attention to what happened in California, dude?”
“Hell no, dude. Nor are they payin’ attention to the fact that the ferries are so run down, they could sink any time. Or that the University that OC works at is gettin’ so run down, what with the budget cuts that keep gettin’ rammed down its throat, it could sink any time. As it is, only the fat cat kids, an’ the football players, can afford to go to school – and, dude, if OC gets deleted, you remember, so do we.”
“Urk.”
“Yeah, dude, urk is right. This is what the people’re payin’ attention to. There’s an ad runnin’ against the income tax initiative. It sez, ‘we can’t trust Olympia with an income tax’.”
“Well, can we?”
“Dude, we elected the people in Olympia – y’know, the governor, state legislators, yadayada. If we can’t trust ’em, what the frickin’ hell did we elect them for?!?”
“Can’t elect nobody if’n y’don’t vote, dude.”
“Screw it, dude. Tryin’ to talk, or vote, sense agin the big money an’ all the people they’ve duped is like blowin’ a spitball into the Sun an’ expectin’ it to raise a sunspot. I reckon I ain’t got long before the Man comes to clamp the ring for the chain around my neck, and there ain’t a thing I can do ’bout it. So until he shows up, I’m gonna partay!”
“Dude!”
You know Dudes, I could have sworn OC told me once that even folks who didn’t vote were jsut as responsible for their elected officials as those who did. in fact, I believe he argued that they were more responsible because in not casting a vote against the insanity they were endorsing it.
Q, I’ll be happy to vote in the next elections. The New Zealand elections. That Americans could vote the Republican Party back into a House majority a mere two years after that party engineered the greatest economic disaster since 1929, and on the basis of propagandizing so blatantly misleading that even Goebbels would have been ashamed, is worse than disgusting. I’m learning that the Kiwis and the Aussies referred to their respective countries as Godzone for a reason, and I have rued leaving New Zealand on several occasions. Never more than now. I’m thinking that the Untied States of America are beyond saving, and we’d do well to sign up for classes in Chinese.