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...
...The madness spread beyond all control, and touched everything...
...The word was meaningless...
...But opposition...
...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...
...In fact, the others were the most pretentious pretenders I have ever encountered...
...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...
...Perhaps the root of the madness was Vietnam...
...he was certainly nowhere near an American university...
...His sharp teeth glistened, and I could see down his throat where the tonsils were swelling...
...When things got out of hand, perhaps a sarcastic diatribe in the Texan or the magazine...
...He would only add to the confusion by strumming his guitar and reciting Ginsberg...
...Atkinson was an inexplicable paradox to our brethren down the hall...
...My hands were quivering, my nerves taut...
...He was often mistaken for one of Them, which gave him a sort of devilish pleasure...
...His hair was long, and his clothes were both ragged and stylish, the ultimate in radical apparel...
...T.C...
...A minor argument now and then, yes...
...James Madison wrote: "The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted...
...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...
...The much-proclaimed "end of ideology" was forgotten...
...And worse yet, they convince a large number of people it's true...
...No, we few who remained sane did so only through our cowardice...
...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...
...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...
...To keep from making that mistake, we need the reminders of those who distrust power-seekers...
...turn and give me his most piercing glower...
...Parties divide the world into the "we" and the "they...
...We survived that last semester at an American university, but only by the slimmest of margins...
...I sighed audibly...
...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...
...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...
...No jury in the world would...
...H. L. Mencken wrote that "a good politician is as unthinkable as an honest thief...
...We few sane ones did what we could to shore up each other's flagging courage...
...He was actually paid by the university to run errands for the magazine's manager...
...A boom year for sloganeers and poster printers...
...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...
...His pointed teeth, and his posture when bent over the accountant's desk...
...I returned to my newspaper, but the printed words were blurred into black streaks...
...As he liked to point out, patronizing affection was a sure signal of social contempt...
...It could have been Jamie Wyeth's latest gallery exhibit for all that it mattered...
...II It was the year of Cambodia and Kent State...
...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...
...T.C...
...Through the uppermost corner of my right eye I saw 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...
...They serve as constant reminders to the general public that no politician ever deserves to wear a crown...
...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...
...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...
...What would a cocktail party be like if there wasn't someone to denounce the whole pack as a bunch of shifty scoundrels...
...In which case our republic might go about the business of anointing a trusted king instead of electing a dubiously deserving president...
...I recently read an article by an eminent conservative scholar reflecting on that incredible period...
...His red beard, blazing eyes, flushed though barely visible cheeks...
...What would be McGovern's 14th welfare plan, or Nixon's 15th secret plan, if there weren't some ignoramus to say, "So what...
...We editors called him The Creep, which is more a biological classification than a name...
...What...
...This was the biggest year for ideology since 1917...
...Let's examine the people who believe office seekers by definition are a bunch of shifty scoundrels...
...Political parties instinctively deify their candidates, especially their presidential candidates...
...YOU'RE TRYING TO DESTROY ME...
...I began to look frantically for a weapon...
...Seated at his stool bent over his old accountant's desk was my Nemesis, my Waterloo...
...T.C...
...Swirling thoughts of the courtroom scene bellowed in my mind...
...You're trying to destroy me...
...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...
...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...
...I was prepared for the assault...
...I asked innocently, with my harried professor's interrupted look...
...The others did...
...I began peeking around the edges of the paper for a possible weapon...
...Mohammed said: "He is the best of men who dislikes power...
...I understood the portent of the scene...
...T.C could have been putting the finishing touches on next month's Daffy Duck series...
...I wish to show that some lack of enthusiasm over politicians and some strong contempt for politicians are vital signs of a healthy democracy...
...He demanded to know why no students stood up to defend civilized order during the great onslaught of 1970...
...took a healthy swig from the Coke bottle and stalked out of the room...
...He didn't pretend to be sane...
...They deserve a little more respect - perhaps even admiration - than we've been giving them...
...my last semester at the university, and I was surrounded by madmen...
...Instead he was glaring at me and about to speak...
...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...
...was only one of them, though more honest than the rest...
...Wick Allison Memoirs of an Insane Age The year is measured in semesters...
...The screech nearly jolted me from my chair...
...Can you imagine living in a world where everyone wore either a Nixon, or McGovern, or Schmitz button...
...And, God help me, I was all alone...
...Montesquieu advised: "Experience...
...I often thought his laughter was a bit forced, but we welcomed it nevertheless...
...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...
...I knew the hour of madness was at hand...
...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...
...His short height...
...We gathered in small groups for safety's sake, and we drank very much very often, and we thought only of survival...
...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 minute I walked in my heart sank...
...During that year the eminent conservative scholar must have been in Afghanistan...
...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...
...grabbed a Coke bottle...
...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...
...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...
...Higher education in America, which in the best of times proceeds at a snail's pace, came to a grinding halt...
...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...
...A year of burnings and marches, bombings and rallies...
...to oppose the raging tide was to throw yourself at the mercy of the hurricane...
...I knew perfectly well what caused it...
...That was no year for reasoned resistance...
...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...
Vol. 6 • January 1973 • No. 4
