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  I'm sure that you are all thoroughly sick and tired of the election by now, what with the Media going mad with the bloody thing, and even politicians somehow getting involved; so I’m most definitely not going to add to their frenzy and your sick-and-tiredness by doing an essay on it.
No, so whether you can’t be a-Biden one camp and you are not able to stomach the McCurse of Cain, or you are wondering just what that other candidate did to inspire the old Slimy and Carbuncle song 'Mama Obama rolled out of bed and she ran to the police station' and, since you are (as I'm sure you are) a long time Monty Python fan, you are not going to do anything but laugh hysterically at anyone called Palin who's wearing a dress, you can rest easy that this essay is not going to be about the election.
Not one little bit.
You see elections are pretty well a crap-shoot anyway, with all those weird Electoral Collegians getting in the way of the majority; and your having to elect so many different guys for so many different positions for so many different levels of importance, from judge-catcher to dog-president, all getting in the way of rational decisions; not to mention the disturbingly linear relationship between the amount spent by a candidate and just how scurrilous are the ads that they spend it on and their success rate and whether it's a direct or inverse relationship; and we won't even mention the fact that most of those attack ads are true enough that the suitability of any given candidate can never be a given---indeed that it's almost certain that wanting to run should be an automatic disqualification---like being a criminal or insane, and if you don't believe me about the crap-shootyness of the process, just think they elected Dubbya a SECOND TIME!! Oh! Actually since stating back there that the criminal and insane are disqualified from running, I've done a bit of research, and would you believe, I can't find a single thing that supports that assumption, which I'm sure you'll agree explains a lot about at least some of the last few presidents.
So let's forget all about O'Cain or McBama and get down to the subject of this essay which, as I said, has nothing at all to do with elections.
 
Now, for a start, we might as well accept the depressing fact that we probably do need a government, and that it probably does need to change from time to time, and having done so, let's turn our frowns upside down, and finally admit that, since we virtually decide on our leaders with the toss of the dice, we ought to be honest and really choose them that way. Or if the idea of using actual dice offends your sense of dignity, then how about a lottery. A lottery's very fair and is about one of the most popular and typically American things we do (falling right between eating a hot dog and owning a gun) and it will finally, finally address one of the worst aspects of the current electoral system (which, remember I'm not discussing). You see apart from all the negative things that I would say about elections, if this essay happened to be about them, the actual representatives who win them are far worse. I mean they aren't really a very representative bunch at all. You see, if you lumped all the various branches of government together and then actually looked at the buggers, you could tell instantly that they are not even a bit like the general population similarly lumped.
I mean, for example, if congress had a composition that accurately represented the nation, then there would be about one hundred and seventy seven and a half more women in it! But with a lottery, with every citizen above 'Lotto Age' entered in it---excluding those, of course, who are criminal, or insane, or (at the risk of tautology) a politician---then our representatives would finally represent us---statistically. There would finally be the same proportion of women, minorities, men and others as in the general population and, of course there would also be the same proportion of the intelligent and the stupid, the honest and the dishonest, the sane and insane, the generous and greedy, the saints and the sinners as in the populace; unlike the current system where the stupid, dishonest, insane, greedy, and sinners are grossly over-represented.
Then all that's left are a few mere details; like do we use scratch cards, or balls with numbers, or even those fabled dice to select the representatives: and of course a few changes in the law to protect our now truly representatives. For example lobbying for money will have to become a crime rather than a career choice (though I admit it could be both for career criminals).
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton
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Notes:
Again the horror comes---from lurking in the bowels of microslob it comes (and we all know what comes from bowels). It comes to ignore standards and...well to make a long story short, it comes to mess with my formatting. I refuse to kowtow to microsoft; so, Windoze Uzers, if you want to see this page formatted correctly I strongly recommend you eschew that disgusting Internet Expectorator that microslime tries to force down your gullet, spit it out, and get a decent browser like Firefox.
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