On the Virtue of Spoiling Ballot Papers

One of the advantages of the British system of democracy has to be the relative brevity of the election season.  An election can be called any time within the five year period and the trick for the incumbents is to get the timing right, though this is not always the case, as with the disastrous decision of Ted Heath to go to the country in 1974.  Sometimes governments lose their majority and are forced to go to the people early, as with the collapse of the Callaghan administration in 1979, which then unleashed Mrs Thatcher on the world..  Indeed, Prime Ministers rarely go to the five year constitutional wire; such is usually a sign of weakness and desperation, of an inability to massage the economy into a state where the incumbent party stands a good chance of re-election.  Hence, the disaster that was the Major government and their crushing defeat in 1997.

 

The American election goes on too long - almost two years, by my count. With no incumbent candidate, that basically means Bush has been out of the limelight for nearly half of his second term, not so much lame-ducked as given perfect cover to do whatever he wants without media scrutiny and the accountability that an informed public should demand.  It's also another example of the syncretistic relationship between politics and showbiz in the U.S.   The campaign is one long dazzling soap opera, where individuals vie for superstardom and the rest of us tune in, night after night, to see how the drama is progressing.   A nation that criticizes a decent cricket match for lasting five days shouldn't be so smug when the political saga, not of who actually runs the country, but of who might perhaps run the country at some point in the future, lasts for months if not years.

 

Most disturbing of all: it shows how deeply embedded the values and idioms of vacuous entertainment and empty images are in both the major parties.  If America's problems include the facts that it is overdosing on entertainment in a way that skews all priorities and undermines intelligent reflection, that televisual image has more reality than, well, reality; that it's political discourse has come to ape the screaming hysteria and black-and-white Manicheeism that makes for many a good action movie (and many a bad blog) but doesn't really reflect the moral subtleties of life and the necessary compromises which allow a democracy to work - well, then, the fact that both parties find it necessary to be entertaining and to use the media and idioms of entertainment and to play out the pantomime in manichean, apocalyptic terms really means that neither can afford to address the fact that this very move precludes the possibility of a serious reformation either of the political process or of the political outcomes.  Just pile up heaps of vacuous buzz word cliches; it doesn't matter what they mean as long as they strike that primal chord in the audience.

 

I believe it was Henry Kissinger who once said that the reason academics fall out so badly is because the stakes are so small.  I suspect the same now applies to his own game, that of politics.

That's the most frustrating thing about not having a vote here - I can't spoil my ballot paper which might be the best and perhaps only way to protest the status quo.