The cascading failure of representative democracy in the US has a lot of causes. Those involve all manner of shell games played by professional politicians, political parties, incumbents, payoffs, power blocks, extortions, bribes, and bird-nests on the ground. Doesn’t matter whether it’s local, state government, national government or some district or other. It’s always the same names, the same non-working solutions, the same broken promises, the same background names everyone recognizes buying them off.
So how’s a country going to break itself free of all the ne’er-do-wells hanging around over Power Lunches, back rooms, limousines, and board rooms thinking up new ways to get rich?
The answer is actually fairly obvious and simple. Opening the system up, letting it air out. Castrating the tradition of pork barrelling over the falls of disaster by a transfusion of new, uncorrupted [yet] blood and single-term tenure in office.
You want to be king? Buy a ticket and take your chances. Want to be a senator or congressman and get rich fast? Buy as many tickets as you want. Sheriff? Mayor? State Governor? Same deal.
Think how refreshing it would be to have some waitress with things sticking out of her lips, nostrils, belly button for your president instead of some sleezeball never did anything in his life except improve his lying skills. A US Senator who only last week lived down in a trailer park trying to figure out how to keep his truck from being repossessed. A governor who just last week was a librarian, clerk in a toy store, selling lawn mowers, renting out excavating equipment, building houses, working some-way-or-other. Scrambling, trying to get by.
There’s a long tradition of picking juries by lottery. And jury-duty’s one hell of a lot more important than hanging around Washington D.C. lying, stealing, and thinking up new strait-jackets for the citizenry to wear.
It ain’t going to happen, of course. If it did I’d personally be careful not to buy a ticket. But I’d be tickled pea-green to see the snake shed its skin and grow a new one. Might actually buy a ticket and give it to some guy hanging out in the parking lot down at the convenience store.
The office holders mightn’t be better than the ones up there now, but they’d be fresh and it would spread the wealth around.
Old Jules