The Right Not to Vote
Loniello, Nicholas
Wick Allison Memoirs of an Insane Age The year is measured in semesters. On the first day of the springs semester, my last semester, I arrived on campus at a comfortable hour and strolled over...
...Now if we go about saying every good citizen should become involved, i.e., become either a Good Republican or a Good Democrat, we may find, some day, a hell of a lot more of one than the other...
...You're trying to destroy me...
...What would a cocktail party be like if there wasn't someone to denounce the whole pack as a bunch of shifty scoundrels...
...On the first day of the springs semester, my last semester, I arrived on campus at a comfortable hour and strolled over to the Journalism Building, the one with "veritas vincit omnia" carved in block letters on the concrete staircase leading to the front doors...
...During that year the eminent conservative scholar must have been in Afghanistan...
...Veritas vincit omnia" is bad syntax, but since the occupants of this building were known for their flagrant disregard for syntax and grammar in English, I don't suppose anyone ever bothered about it in Latin...
...T.C...
...As he liked to point out, patronizing affection was a sure signal of social contempt...
...The word was meaningless...
...They serve as constant reminders to the general public that no politician ever deserves to wear a crown...
...T.C...
...If the river of emotion arose from a single source, if the madness had a central purpose or reason, it soon became disconNicholas Loniello: The Right Not to Vote People have an important right not to vote...
...That special breed of elector who mistrusts every politician, who refuses to vote for either Devil "A" or Devil "B," preserves some very important tenets of democracy...
...my last semester at the university, and I was surrounded by madmen...
...Political parties instinctively deify their candidates, especially their presidential candidates...
...Swirling thoughts of the courtroom scene bellowed in my mind...
...II It was the year of Cambodia and Kent State...
...to oppose the raging tide was to throw yourself at the mercy of the hurricane...
...turn and give me his most piercing glower...
...James Madison wrote: "The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted...
...That was no year for reasoned resistance...
...He was often mistaken for one of Them, which gave him a sort of devilish pleasure...
...Wick Allison Memoirs of an Insane Age The year is measured in semesters...
...I began to look frantically for a weapon...
...Instead he was glaring at me and about to speak...
...His hair was long, and his clothes were both ragged and stylish, the ultimate in radical apparel...
...He was actually paid by the university to run errands for the magazine's manager...
...His sharp teeth glistened, and I could see down his throat where the tonsils were swelling...
...he was certainly nowhere near an American university...
...Parties speak of the Parade of Horribles that would follow the election of "them," and the March to Goodness that would follow the election of "us...
...took a healthy swig from the Coke bottle and stalked out of the room...
...We editors called him The Creep, which is more a biological classification than a name...
...He would only add to the confusion by strumming his guitar and reciting Ginsberg...
...I wish to show that some lack of enthusiasm over politicians and some strong contempt for politicians are vital signs of a healthy democracy...
...I often thought his laughter was a bit forced, but we welcomed it nevertheless...
...The madness spread beyond all control, and touched everything...
...Seated at his stool bent over his old accountant's desk was my Nemesis, my Waterloo...
...Bartlett had risen by the sweat of his brow from that favorite of all sociologists' muddles, the lower classes - and he wasn't too pleased by the sudden affection expressed by these long-haired, solidly bourgeois students for the poor, the blacks, the Indians, the dispossessed...
...In which case our republic might go about the business of anointing a trusted king instead of electing a dubiously deserving president...
...Inside, shaking my head at the pious inaccuracy of the quotation, I rounded a corner to the left, avoided a collision with a Daily Texan reporter interviewing himself, and entered the familiar cluttered precincts of the magazine office...
...When matters got really out of hand, I would practice syllogisms and other exercises in logic, sometimes aloud before gathered friends, like a banned priest reciting whispered secrets of salvation...
...was only one of them, though more honest than the rest...
...T.C...
...Madness was in the air that spring, and I was one of the few who had not tasted it, although I couldn't avoid the odor of its presence...
...And worse yet, they convince a large number of people it's true...
...But free citizens have two important rights corollary to the right to vote: First, the right to choose not to make a choice (or the right to despise politicians generally) and second, the right to ignore entirely the appeals of politicians and shrug off calls to civic duty...
...YOU'RE TRYING TO DESTROY ME...
...We survived that last semester at an American university, but only by the slimmest of margins...
...I recently read an article by an eminent conservative scholar reflecting on that incredible period...
...A warning of danger occurs when "the right not to vote for any of the bums," or "the right not to be interested," is dishonored or disrespected...
...Let's examine the people who believe office seekers by definition are a bunch of shifty scoundrels...
...This was the biggest year for ideology since 1917...
...I began peeking around the edges of the paper for a possible weapon...
...I returned to my newspaper, but the printed words were blurred into black streaks...
...Atkinson, tiredly skeptical and our best wit, would push a beer in my direction and launch into one of his remarkable imitations of the latest campus heroes, reducing their sizeable buffoonery to manageable limits...
...Through the uppermost corner of my right eye I saw T.C...
...What...
...To keep from making that mistake, we need the reminders of those who distrust power-seekers...
...Montesquieu advised: "Experience...
...His pointed teeth, and his posture when bent over the accountant's desk...
...Our republic should be grateful to the many who have a generic suspicion of politicians - they keep the rest of us from becoming too myopic in our fidelity to a political party...
...I sighed audibly...
...Can you imagine living in a world where everyone wore either a Nixon, or McGovern, or Schmitz button...
...I asked innocently, with my harried professor's interrupted look...
...Edgar Howe wrote: "That politicians are permitted to carry on the same old type of disgraceful campaign from year to year is as insulting to the people as would be a gang of thieves coming back to a town they had robbed, staging a parade, and inviting the citizens to fall in and cheer...
...A minor argument now and then, yes...
...He demanded to know why no students stood up to defend civilized order during the great onslaught of 1970...
...In fact, the others were the most pretentious pretenders I have ever encountered...
...T.C could have been putting the finishing touches on next month's Daffy Duck series...
...The minute I walked in my heart sank...
...A boom year for sloganeers and poster printers...
...Atkinson was an inexplicable paradox to our brethren down the hall...
...We gathered in small groups for safety's sake, and we drank very much very often, and we thought only of survival...
...Mohammed said: "He is the best of men who dislikes power...
...A large share of the electorate believes every politician that ever came down the pike is an accomplished crook, or the partly-owned fool of crooks...
...I knew the hour of madness was at hand...
...They deserve a little more respect - perhaps even admiration - than we've been giving them...
...Bartlett, eminently practical and stal-wartly provincial, would drop by the magazine office to laugh uproariously over the day's editorials in the Texan, the curious ramblings of our colleagues down the hall...
...We few sane ones did what we could to shore up each other's flagging courage...
...I knew perfectly well what caused it...
...A year of burnings and marches, bombings and rallies...
...The screech nearly jolted me from my chair...
...No jury in the world would...
...I was prepared for the assault...
...grabbed a Coke bottle...
...H. L. Mencken wrote that "a good politician is as unthinkable as an honest thief...
...I understood the portent of the scene...
...The others did...
...Lately I've come to view the people who refuse to vote out of protest or who fail to vote out of lack of interest as two very special breeds...
...And, God help me, I was all alone...
...My hands were quivering, my nerves taut...
...Higher education in America, which in the best of times proceeds at a snail's pace, came to a grinding halt...
...Perhaps the root of the madness was Vietnam...
...But opposition...
...His short height...
...No, we few who remained sane did so only through our cowardice...
...Parties divide the world into the "we" and the "they...
...What would be McGovern's 14th welfare plan, or Nixon's 15th secret plan, if there weren't some ignoramus to say, "So what...
...He didn't pretend to be sane...
...I had suggested in a meeting earlier in the week that the funds spent on our errand-runner might be better used to pay our starving student writers...
...fits - the present tense indicating that he still does, if he's still alive, a question which has never bothered me - he fits my ideal image of the successful comic book cartoonist...
...I made my way to the composing table with a carefully rehearsed indifference to his existence, sat down at my usual chair, and began poring studiously over the latest issue of the Texan...
...The exhortations of a number of public and private agencies can make a man feel guilty if he doesn't go hog wild over one or another candidate...
...It could have been Jamie Wyeth's latest gallery exhibit for all that it mattered...
...And Abraham Lincoln advised, "Politicians are a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people and who, taken as a mass, are at least one step removed from honest men...
...His red beard, blazing eyes, flushed though barely visible cheeks...
...When things got out of hand, perhaps a sarcastic diatribe in the Texan or the magazine...
...The much-proclaimed "end of ideology" was forgotten...
Vol. 6 • January 1973 • No. 4
