A MODEL PLATFORM
Meyer, Ernest L.
A Model Platform By ERNEST L. MEYER JUDGING by the response of delegates who attended most of the sweltering sessions in Chicago, the Republicans barely carried their own convention. No one, of...
...8. Immediate United States membership in a League of Nations...
...A committee of the delegates, however, bravely contrived to hew out a platform on which they hope to climb to victory in the November elections...
...I will do away with such contemptible secrecy...
...Perhaps in the dead of night the party wheelhorses are chained to a hearse that carts the bleached splinters of the platform planks to some remote graveyard along the Potomac where they are buried in the dark of the moon while a lone owl whoops in the weeping willows...
...2. Return of the inalienable rights of free-born Americans, including nickel movies, free lunch at taverns, and unrationed beefsteak for breakfast...
...On the week following my inauguration I will proclaim a day of national mourning...
...7. Absolute American isolation from all affairs of Europe and Asia...
...Away with the drab subterfuges of old-line politicians who under cover of darkness, and with no witnesses near, drop their campaign pledges into a moat with all the horrid privacy of an unwed mother disposing of an unwanted child...
...Most of the platform, in the sound tradition of the GOP, is vague as a bumblebug in a blackout...
...They had heard, the same planks sawed so often before that they knew the hokum by heart...
...3. Free distribution by Congressmen of automatic porch traps to capture tax collectors, soap salesmen, and villains who litter the hallway with dodgers advertising sales of floor-wax and waffle-irons...
...They know as well as I do that party pledges and platforms are merely vote-catching tanglefoot never meant to be translated into law...
...We have had candidates who pledged peace and gave us carnivals of slaughter...
...There's color for you...
...Nay, I promise a public burial, and I promise to seek the secretly buried cadavers of all past political platforms and add them to the vaults of the National Pledge Mausoleum in Arlington Cemetery...
...Only one-tenth of the delegates remained in the hall to hear the platform read...
...Free trade...
...While the funeral procession marches solemnly down Pennsylvania Avenue, bands will be playing Handel's Largo...
...Women in the huge crowd of mourners will become hysterical and faint, to the great gratification of news photographers...
...the inventor of invisible house numbers, and the oaf who bursts into your office and displays a collapsible tooth-brush he won in a radio quiz contest...
...For some fantastic reason, vagueness is considered sound political strategy...
...Then my pledges, carefully embalmed, will be carried on a litter by members of the Cabinet and the Justices of the Supreme Court to be placed in my newly constructed National Pledge Mausoleum in Arlington Cemetery...
...ticket sellers for the Fourth Ward Sausage Makers' Auxiliary Grand Benefit Raffle and Shirtwaist Bazaar...
...These critics are naive...
...Provided, of course, there's room...
...6. A return to national prohibition...
...Through the years, the patient public has grown accustomed to seeing pledges and platforms vanish like tired fireflies in the fog of expediency...
...They were merely cut and dried fish strung out on the party line for an airing...
...4. Immediate exile to Alaska of the following undesirable citizens: the inventors of hotel roller towels and paper drinking cups on trains...
...A permanent peacetime standing army of 10,-000,000 men...
...Immediate and complete American disarmament at the end of the war...
...A choir composed of Senate pages will sing...
...Everyone knows that the pledges will die a violent death, but for generations we have been wondering what our office-holders do with the corpses...
...the fussy ladies who stand in line at a cafeteria and spend five minutes prodding speculative thumbs into bread to test its freshness...
...5. Unlimited, cheap whiskey and gin...
...You can't catch a sucker with an unbaited hook...
...A Day Of Mourning My plan has the virtue of candor and of drama...
...It will be objected by critics that some of the planks of my model platform are contradictory...
...If I were the standard bearer for a political party, I would run on a model, forthright platform along the lines of the following: Bait For The Hook 1. Two tires for every car...
...9. A high protective tariff...
...And the proceedings were so hackneyed that, what with the heat and humidity, before the end of even the first day the poor fish were thoroughly mouldy and mil-deweyed...
...We have had candidates who pledged prosperity and gave us apple-stands...
...Most successful candidates are content to let their pledges wither and die without any publicity and fuss, thus depriving the public of a thrill...
...And I myself, mounted on a coal-black steed, will be photographed, weeping into my handkerchief, by ninety and nine movie camera men...
...The other nine-tenths, older and more seasoned party veterans, didn't have to stay...
...So why not, in the name of common sense, promise all things to all men and scuttle the whole phony platform with one blockbuster...
...To my mind, such a theory is nonsense...
...No one, of course, can blame the delegates for bolting the boredom...
Vol. 8 • July 1944 • No. 28
