Such a Good Idea
Well, perfect. Absolutely splendid. Good thinking. It’s such a boring unhip vieux jeu Enlightenment kind of idea, to think that people in high office ought to have something to recommend them beyond pure Name Recognition. How silly is that?! What else is there but name recognition?
No, of course. Obviously. Obviously having your picture taken a great many times in rapid succession is simply the ideal qualification for being, say, the president of the United States, the single most powerful human being on the planet, or the governor of California, a state larger than many important countries. After all, presidents and governors get their pictures taken a lot too, so there you are.
Yeah, come on, this is such a brilliant reform, let’s really push it through, let’s get mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it anymore (take what? who knows, who cares) and throw out all those condescending elitist know-it-alls (if there are any left) and replace them with more photogenic people. Let’s make Jennifer Aniston Secretary of State, and Sly Stallone Ambassador to the UN, and Tom Cruise governor of New York, and let’s throw out the entire Congress and replace it with everyone (still alive) who’s been in the cast of Saturday Night Live, and impeach the Supreme Court and replace it with the cast of ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Friends’ (omitting either Joey or George, whichever). Then when we do that the rest of the world will be so jealous they’ll do the same thing, and pretty soon the whole world will be run by movie stars and athletes. It will be like Utopia! Like a beautiful dream!
Assuming you *are* talking about Conan the Republican, I think you may be being a little unfair. Early indications are that he has lots to recommend him as a good Republican politician, if you believe the article below, anyway.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&ItemID=4300
Not just Conan the R, but also Sonny Bono, and Ronald Reagan, and Jesse Ventura, and for that matter, W, whose only ‘qualification’ for the job he has is being someone’s son. He too, of course, has lots to recommend him as a good Republican pol, but that’s not the same thing as qualifications. I think people should have both.
and I think politicians should be more left wing. But, apart from a personal preference, what is there to say? In the end, is not democracy a popularity contest whose terms we cannot dictate, no matter how vulgar?
Yes, which is why democracy is yet another thing I have reservations about.
But. It is worse here than it is for instance in the UK, simply because over there the party chooses the candidates. The parties generally don’t want to pick hopelessly unqualified people to run, and they generally don’t. It’s less democratic, and a good thing too!
So, what there is to say is that democracy and the popular will and majority opinion are not unmixed blessings, because politics really shouldn’t be a popularity contest.
And saying something is part of the process, after all. People say something, and maybe someday things will get a little better. Probably not, but who knows.
Ms. Benson,
Your contempt of the Californian voter is showing. You should get together with the Greens and their dark warnings about ‘the limits of democracy’.
If Californians are so dumb how did they build the worlds 6th biggest economy, and provide a living space that probably half the planet would migrate to if they could ?
Whether or no the Governator will perform is debatable – many conservatives have doubts. But I can’t see why any sane person would be surprised at the voters tipping the repugnant Davis out on his ear.
Having done so they had a list of hundreds to choose from, including the Best-of-the-Left, and they chose Arnie.
I suspect, Ophelia, that you will be too partisan to admit, even now, that Ron Reagan was a good Governor, and a great President. If so the loss is yours, making you just that very small fraction smaller.
Robert, I don’t think one has to be partisan to criticise Reagan. But, unlike Ophelia, I would criticise him as any other politician who demonstrated such balatant disregard for international law.
And OB, I don’t understand what you mean by “qualified”. It seems to me that Arnie is popular, has gained party support and has promised to deliver to the party’s constituency – Enron. That sounds perfectly competent, politically.
Yes I know they chose ‘Arnie’, Mr. Blair, that’s what I’m criticising. As I say, I don’t think having one’s picture taken is a good qualification for the office. It’s quite a simple point, I think. And it’s not a disguise for something else, it’s just what it is.
I remember a veteran Swiss journalist telling me that the great thing about Switzerland was that despite their enlightened democratic system, no one in their right mind would choose to exercise their full entitlements in the knowledge that it would lead to chaos. Although it would, theoretically, be quite easy under the Swiss constitution to raise a petition demanding a referendum on the abolition of taxes, no one chooses to do so. The same, it appears, does not apply in California.