Happy Friday friends,
We had an election this week, you’ve probably noticed.
If I am being honest, I probably feel the same about democracy as I do about that other great American cultural institution now firmly in the grip of a corrupt cabal of unaccountable self-serving extremists, looting our cultural heritage and splitting our social fabric in the process: Baseball.
Like baseball, I cannot shake the raw emotional pull of polling day, the sense that I am being allowed to participate in something good, something other people wish they had, something which — if done right — can be ennobling and salutary for us all. And, like baseball, it seems to me that American democracy has been overrun by people who despise it, and despise those of us who love it, and who are hellbent on twisting it to perverse and corrupt ends.
Case in point, where I live ballots are now always a dozen or so pages long, with actual elections to office comprising barely the first page or two. The rest are a series of referenda on various amendments to the state constitution — usually amounting to less oversight for elected officials or permission to gerrymander at will — and a never-ending
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