Why I Won't Vote, or, Mulligan Stew: It’s What’s for Dinner

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I’m calling for a boycott of this year’s presidential election. Who’s with me? 


I wasn’t old enough to vote in 1972 (I was 17), and of the elections I’ve participated in since I became a legally eligible voter, things have not gone well, whether my candidate won or not. So this go-round, I’m staying home. I will not be a party to validating any of the fools on either roster. Here’s a snapshot of why:


When I was a teenager in the very late 60s and early 70s, I knew it was a dirty, corrupt world we were living in. I’d witnessed the Kennedy and King assassinations, watched Detroit, L.A., Newark, Chicago, and a whole host of other stellar U.S. cities go up in flames in protest and race riots, learned of the murders at the Rolling Stones’ free concert at Altamont only a few months after the success of Woodstock (thank you, Hell’s Angels!), and sighed in disgust as I watched the evening news reports of how our very own Ohio National Guard used live rounds to quell an anti-war protest at Kent State University and wound up killing four students. Ah, yes, peace, love, and happiness.


Like all teenagers of my generation, I grew up watching the Vietnam war on TV every night. My father insisted on viewing the nightly news as we ate dinner: roast beef, whipped potatoes, green peas, and Walter Cronkite. Now, there’s a hearty middle American meal! Nothing quite like watching black and white news footage of bandaged and war-torn American soldiers being dragged through rice paddies to hovering Huey helicopters under fire and piles and piles of Vietcong bodies in ditches to stir your appetite and get the old salivary glands pumping. Add a little personal acquaintance to the mix— guys in your neighborhood drafted and disappearing —and well, by golly, you’ve got some hot red, white, and blue blood spurtin’ through them veins!


So you can appreciate why I got a peculiarly vicarious enjoyment out of spending a good deal of the summer of my junior year of high school watching the Watergate hearings.  Aside from having a natural thirst for justice, I was fascinated by the ever-widening scandal in the circus menagerie that was the Nixon administration in 1972. I already had a well-developed distrust for authority— public school had seen to that —but the depth and breadth of the “cancer on the presidency” (as John Dean described it) only served to fuel my disdain for those wielding any sort of power at all, from the head of a classroom to the head of a nation. As far as I was concerned, the 60s mantra, “never trust anyone over thirty” was as valid a warning as “never place the plug-in radio on the edge of the bathtub.” Politicians were greedy, self-centered, two-faced, hypocritical, dangerous, lying sons of bitches— and those were the Democrats. The Republicans were even worse! 


I can’t say that my opinion has changed much over the years. What a sense of justice and satisfaction, then, as I watched Nixon and his wormy administration writhe and squirm under the sharp point of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox’s penetrating judicial needle as he probed ever deeper into the flesh of the Nixon presidency and zeroed in on the source of the “cancer,” Nixon himself.



Okay, so what does that have to do with anything today? Why dredge up 40+ year-old American history?


Because, apparently, the American people didn’t learn a single lesson from it, that’s why. How else to explain the current political lineup on both sides? Trump? Are you kidding me? Are there really people in this country who are that stupid? For all the Republican rhetoric about President Obama having had deep socialist leanings, why would a narcissistic Facist-leaning carp mouth like Trump be leading anything except a line of Wall Street criminals to the state penitentiary? For that matter, how could any of his Republican cronies even dare to show their bigoted faces on the playing field? And Mitch McConnell? Don’t get me started.


Three hundred twenty-something million people, and these pandering, self-centered, jackals— owned and operated by banks, lobbyists, pharmaceutical companies, and the N.R.A., not to mention flesh-eating corporations like Halliburton and Raytheon and defense contractors like Lockheed-Martin —are the best we can do? It’s shameful, it’s embarrassing, it’s an insult to common sense and it’s an ever-present danger to our well-being. Oh, God, what I wouldn’t give to have Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin or even George himself pass through a portal in time and address this nation today! Which of us “patriotic Americans”- who kill more of our own people with guns and cars every year than any enemy ever killed —would not hang his or her head in utter humiliation?


Sometimes I think if I hear one more politician tell me what “the American people want,” I’m going to scream so shrilly, so hysterically, that I’m going to rip open my own aorta. I am the American people, you tax-fattened hyenas, and you do NOT speak for me! Do NOT pontificate! Do NOT tell me all the things you’ll do when you get into office that the very concept of checks and balances will prevent you from doing unilaterally! And for God’s sake— and I mean, for God’s sake —quit dragging God and Jesus into every conversation and every issue. Our country was NOT founded on Christian principles! It was founded on freedom of religion. Did you hear that? FREEDOM OF RELIGION, not adherence to religion.


Oh, and don’t get me started about “every life matters.” Until they (pick the group you don’t like) move into your neighborhood. Until they take the job you won’t stoop to do yourself. Illegal immigrants? Unless you’re an American Indian— a native American in the purest of terms —you are the illegal immigrant. I am the illegal immigrant. If the original owners of the property we now call the United States of America had had a stricter immigration policy— maybe even built a wall —most, maybe all, of us wouldn’t be here. Refugees? We don’t need no steenkin’ refugees! Never mind about the refugees we bitched about before- you know, our grandfathers and great grandfathers— those despicables like the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Chinese, the Polish . . . all those rabble rousing freeloaders we let in at the turn of the last century. You see how that turned out, don’t you? 


And, oh yes, how could I forget the original refugees, the English and the French, the Spanish and the Dutch and the Portuguese, and the . . . Honestly, if you want to know just how dangerous it is to let refugees into your country, just ask the American Indians. Their ancestors knew a thing or two about letting in undesirables.


So, I’m not going to vote this next election. Simply put, there’s nothing and no one to vote for.


No, wait a minute. I take that back. I am going to vote, but mine is going to be a write-in vote. I’m going to vote for the human race. Not races, or religions, or nationalities, or causes, or special interests or any of that other divisive stuff. No saving the unborn endangered gay whales on Wall Street that hunt and glow in the dark for Jesus. Just humans. You know— planet earth humans. And I’m going to vote for the Golden Rule. Yeah, that’s it. Like John Lennon sang: “You may call me a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” And I’m going to throw my vote to the original concept of this democratic union. I’m voting for Proposition 1: the United States as a melting pot.


Whoops! Did I say melting pot? Maybe I’d better reconsider about voting for a melting pot. After all, here’s what you get when you have a melting pot: a Mulligan stew. A little bit of everything. And we can’t have that in a country where the leaders demand that we all speak the same language, worship the same god, carry the same guns, wave the same flag, worship the same heroes, drink the same Kool Aid, blah, blah, blah. Except, Mulligan Stew is what our forefathers cooked up. Stew. It’s what’s for dinner. So I say, eat up or shut up.


Me? I’m hungry, and Mulligan stew’s what’s for dinner. 


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