The Pendulum: It's the Pits

by Joseph S. Bommarito

During the first hour of C-SPAN’s daily "Washington Journal," the moderator typically asks a question of viewers. A few days ago the question was: What issues will you be thinking about when you go to the polls in November? Heady stuff, indeed. 

C-SPAN had the usual three phone lines set up: Buzzards, Hawks, and Dithering Mugwumps, so called because of their propensity to sit with their mugs on one side of the fence and their wumps on the other. Actually, it was the usual Democrats, Republicans, and the ubiquitous Others.

Predictably, the Buzzards . . . I mean the Democrats, were screeching about social and economic issues: They cheeped about what the Republicans wanted to do with Social Security—my favorite oxymoron—and how the promises made to old people would be reneged upon. They chirped about the economy, and how the nasty-wasty R’s woke up one morning and said, “It’s time to wreck the economy so we can lose the mid-term elections.” They cawed about corporate greed and how all the current economic problems could be laid at that doorstep. They cackled about ties, potential and imagined, between corporate greedsters and the White House. And they quacked about whether they were going to get what their favorite Congressweasels promised them in terms of cold, hard cash or hot, indirect transfer payments, their pound of flesh from the barely-warm body of economic America. 

The Hawks . . . I mean the Republicans, had their turn, too. They crowed about the excesses . . . I mean the successes, of the Forever War on Evil Terrorism. They hooted about continuing the War on Evil Drugs. They squawked about the defeat of the Evil Taliban and the upcoming, impending, waiting-in-the wings war on the Evil Saddam. They clutched the mantra of the War on Evil ______ (fill in the blank with your favorite Evil) in their talons like a big, warm, fuzzy security blanket. Significantly, there was no mention of the War on Evil Poverty, that war having been foisted on us by the Buzz . . . Democrats, and three trillion or so dollars later, still being fought. Somehow, in all this puff-chested, feather-preening self-congratulation, they completely forgot about the ever-escalating War on Taxpayers, not to mention the increasingly successful War on Liberties.  

Then there were the Dithering Mugwumps . . . I mean the Others. Many of them sided with the Buzzards about getting their own beaks into the rotting carcass of corporate, economic America before the predicted putrefaction got too bad. Others sided with the Hawks, with visions of sugarplum war materiel contracts and fears of stumbling around in a nuclear- and/or biologically-blighted wasteland dancing in their heads, courtesy of a third-world, fourth-rate dictator named Madman-Who’s Sane? or some such thing. Some of the Others pulled out the “Constitution doesn’t allow ______” (fill in the blank with your favorite unconstitutional behavior) rhetoric and applied it to coerced enrichment of the non-productive masses at the cost of the productive or to the making, prosecuting, and executing of Congressionally non-declared war by the Chief Maker, Prosecutor, and Executor of war. 

But is this truly indicative of what the public will really be thinking on November ___? (Fill in the blank; I'm purposefully remaining ignorant of the date as part of my twelve-step program for voters in recovery.) 

Before I continue, here are some relevant numbers:Year 2000

Population of the U. S.:  281,400,000. Yep, a quarter of a billion and then some.

Voting age population:  205,815,000 (73.1% of total population)

Registered to vote:  129,549,000 (62.9% of voting age; 46.0% of total)

Voted:  105,405,000 (81.4% of registered.; 51.2% of voting age)

Voted for Bush:*  50,456,002 (47.9% of voters; 24.5% of voting age) [1]

(*Isn’t it interesting that the guy worried about green, leafy things was named after what a bull does to a matador, and the other guy, the one proposing to do to that third-world, fourth-rate dictator what a bull does to a matador, is named after a green, leafy thing? Oh, the irony.)

We’re running around hailing a member of the vegetable kingdom as the “leader of the free world” based on the approval of less than a quarter of the voting age population! Does this offer a clue as to what people think at election time? About 49 percent either think so little of the process, or just plain think so little, period, that they don’t register or, if registered, they don’t vote. On that basis, if we could count unregistered and “registered but not voting” as being for None Of The Above, then NOTA won the election, hands down, with 100,410,000 votes, twice as many as the small plant. 

Most of those who actually believe in the process and get up the gumption to go to the polls automatically pull the lever for R or D without thought. Some actually think their way through the process and still mostly pull R or D, but they mix up their ballot a little, some R, some D, an occasional other letter. A very few think a bit more and vote L or G or NL or S . . . whatever spoonful of the alphabet soup of politics they savor. But mostly, people don’t think.  

To get some insight into the non-voter, I called up my old acquaintance, Snicky Moroni. Snicky got his nickname in high school. His name was really Nicky but he carried a switchblade and frequently pulled it out to clean his fingernails. He concentrated a lot of grease under his nails, a mixture of gear grease, 10-40 motor oil, transmission fluid, and Vaseline Hair Oil, and it was sometimes hard to tell which he used on what. He also used the switchblade during study hall to carve initials on his desk, resulting in frequent suspensions for destruction to school property. Nobody had more school holidays than Snicky. It was the sound the blade made when it snicked open that gave him the nickname. As usual, Snicky didn’t disappoint me. He rendered me the following screed:

"Joe, I think about like it’s a Big Pendulum, ya know. I mean, sometimes it swings to the left and sometimes it swings to the right. Sometimes it swings more and sometimes it swings less. But really, it’s like a bunch of big pendulums, like there’s a President pendulum and there’s a Senate pendulum and there’s a House pendulum and that always affects the Big Pendulum. So, I don’t worry about it ’cause it’s always gonna come back. It’s cool.” Snick. 

I can dig that. The problem is, the Big Pendulum doesn’t always swing back to the original position. And it moves in another direction, too. Down. Always down. 

Remember that scene from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum?” Well, folks, that’s where we are. The American body politic is tied down on a big table, a huge razor-edged pendulum scything back and forth over us—back and forth, forth and back. Every few swings, it drops. Just a little bit, almost unnoticeably. But it drops. And we can’t get away. We’re strapped down by our state-woven bonds, ties that we had a hand in making: Social Security, welfare, a pretty good road system, free (for many) public education, a (relatively) free market that brings us lots of neat stuff, a damned entertaining political system, and other government-supplied goodies. Bread and circuses. We’re fat and happy. Just like a calf about to become veal.  

Some folks, those big L people, are trying to figure out how to stop the pendulum. And while they run around yelling, “The sky is falling! The frog is boiling!”, that blade keeps getting lower. Swishshsh . . . .

[1] All figures from Bureau of Census or Federal Elections Commission. Don’t believe me; you can look them up on the Internet at a (shudder) government web site.