Back when I was still working at the Kansas City Star and getting regular requests to speak at schools, it didn’t take long to realize the only person even vaguely interested in my appearances were the teachers who invited me, mainly because my showing up meant they didn’t have to prepare a lesson plan or teach for an hour.
The students, on the other hand, reacted to my appearances like they’d done shots of Nyquil 20 minutes earlier and had just been informed that a complete stranger was going to explain the Food Pyramid in Ancient Arabic and take his time doing it.
Their response was underwhelming.
(Weird thought: if you can be underwhelmed and overwhelmed, when you’re neither, are you whelmed? Discuss.)
I quickly figured out I had to get students interested in what I was saying, so I started asking how many kids in the room cared about politics and the only one that would raise his hand would be some geek with glasses who appeared to have no shot at ever ever ever getting laid in the near or distant future, so he decided to put all his untapped sexual energy into becoming class president, a U.S. Senator or a serial killer, whichever worked out first.
After getting a listless response to my question about politics, I’d then ask how many kids thought smoking a joint was no worse than their parents having a cocktail.
Or figured if they were old enough to join the military and fight in a war, they were old enough to have one of those Happy Hour cocktails with their parents.
Or if they got pregnant or got someone else pregnant, if it should be up to them what to do about it or some politician with a King James Bible shoved up his butt.
After that the students would perk up and I’d tell them you might not be interested in politics, but politicians are interested in you and they’d actually prefer it if you paid no attention because then those politicians could pull whatever underhanded bullshit they had in mind without interference and right about there I’m guessing some of the teachers regretted inviting me to speak.
Too late, you invited a combination of Karl and Groucho Marx to talk to your kids and give them ideas that might come back and bite you in the ass.
As for you adults currently reading this:
If you want to know why you should still subscribe to whatever’s left of your daily newspaper: I’ve heard reporters say before public meetings start it’s not uncommon for someone to ask if there are any reporters in the room (they have to identify themselves) and the reason they want to know that is they’ve got one agenda if reporters are there and a different agenda if no one’s going to find out what they did when no one was looking.
Even if you never read the newspaper you subscribe to, you still want someone in the room when a bunch of politicians are trying to decide how much crap they can get away with.
Why You Should Still Vote Even When You Don’t Like The Choices
There are people who argue all politicians are the same, so what does it matter who gets elected, but when he was president Donald Trump appointed three of the Supreme Court Justices who now seem intent on turning back the clock to the 1950s when it was OK to be a racist, sexually harass women and use the CIA to assassinate whatever Third-World Pain-In-The-Ass pissed us off lately.
(I’m pretty sure that last one is still happening, but they’ve gotten sneakier since the time they considered killing Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar…and I didn’t make that up.)
While most politicians are hypocrites and the ones who Fight The Powers That Be tend to get shot by “lone” gunmen, who gets elected makes a difference because politicians are not all the same unless you think an Al Gore presidency would be no different than the one we had under George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton would have behaved exactly like Donald Trump.
Al and Hillary would definitely get up to some hypocritical bullshit, but it would be totally different hypocritical bullshit than the hypocritical bullshit we got from W. and Donald.
Bottom line: I figure voting is kind of like not littering.
I can’t do anything about all the trash dumped in the streets or on the sidewalks or elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, but I can make sure I’m not part of the problem. Politicians make the rules we have to live under and voting is my attempt to push the needle in the right direction.
Plus, if you don’t vote you have no right to complain about how things are run and we all love to complain and some of us have even made a good living doing it.
You Should Vote, But This Is Still Bullshit
So I get home from my trip to LA and there are two pieces of mail waiting for me. One of those: You’ve been selected for a free steak dinner and all you have to do get it is listen to us try to sell you:
A. A place in some urine-soaked retirement home…
B. A time-share condo you won’t use and will almost immediately regret buying…
C. Or financial planning by some Human Barracuda who will try to slice off as much of your money as possible for himself.
Turns out I can’t afford the “free” dinners being offered.
Trying to convince me to attend a sales pitch I have no interest in reminds me of the time a Royals front office guy suggested that since he was retired from baseball, my buddy Jason Kendall should start attending the Royals Alumni Association meetings.
Jason asked: “When’s the next one?”
Front-office guy: “Next Tuesday.”
Jason: “I’m sure I’ll be there.”
Front-office guy: “Really?”
Jason: “I’d rather you kicked me in the nuts 10 times.”
Witnessing that exchange had a profound effect on me because I realized I would have wound up at some meeting I didn’t want to attend because I’m too concerned with pleasing others and because he was honest, Jason wouldn’t and BTW Jason’s blunt response made the front-office guy laugh.
On the other hand, honesty and blunt responses are one of the reasons Jason Kendall isn’t in the Hall of Fame and if you want to read more about why he should be, here you go:
https://leejudge.substack.com/p/should-jason-kendall-be-in-the-hall
As for that second piece of mail:
It was from the Voter Participation Center which I’d never heard of and they informed me how I voted was a secret, but whether or not I voted is a public record and added that they were sending this mailing to me and my neighbors to let us know who voted and who didn’t and they’d be watching to see if I voted on Tuesday which came across as vaguely threatening if by “vaguely threatening” you actually mean “pretty fucking threatening.”
So I Googled the Voter Participation Center and while they’re supposedly “non-partisan” two of the top dogs were former Democratic strategists and the VPC and a sister organization, the Center for Voter Information, put over $47,000 into promoting Joe Biden’s 2020 run for president.
Now here’s an article about all this from The Baltimore Banner and the article says the state Attorney General sent the organizations a “cease and desist” letter which is High-Priced Legalese for “knock this shit off.” If you want to read the article, here’s the link:
In the article you just ignored, the president of the Voter Participation Center admitted they were trying to shame people into voting and all I can say about that is I don’t need any help feeling ashamed.
I’m guessing most of us feel the same way because we know all the screwed up things we’ve done even if other people don’t and if you can’t think of anything you’ve done wrong you might be a Paragon of Virtue, but odds are much better you’re a Goddamn Psychopath. I watched all the movies and near as I can tell, Hannibal Lecter never felt embarrassed.
The main thing I take away from all this is:
Getting the vote out is a good idea, but they’ve chosen a bad way to accomplish that and the second thing is if Democrats want you to vote, but (if you aren’t in the right demographic) Republicans don’t, maybe that should tell you something about how to vote – as always, your call.
Anyway…
Google “why do Republicans try to suppress the vote” and you’ll be offered a long list of articles and here’s one of them:
https://www.newsweek.com/house-republicans-cant-save-themselves-voter-suppression-opinion-1950977
Either way — Red, Blue or Purple — vote.
A lot of Americans have died to give you that right and not voting is like saying they shouldn’t have gone to the trouble and you don’t give a crap that they fought the British or charged into machine gun fire on Normandy Beach or marched for Civil Rights while the police beat them and ill-tempered German Shepherds tried to take a chunk out of their ass, because you think standing in line and putting a check mark on a piece of paper is way too much trouble.
Today’s Lesson
Free dinners aren’t free unless you think your time is worthless, Jason Kendall should be in the Hall of Fame and however you vote, you should vote.
(And if you don’t I’m telling your neighbors.)
And, of course, you made me look up whelm :-). According to the interweb, whelm is derived from the Old English hwielfan,. Whelm past tense or past participle: = whelmed
* engulf, submerge, or bury. "a swimmer whelmed in a raging storm"
* flow or heap up abundantly."
I talked to my crazy minarchist / libertarian / Reagan worshiping brother Steven on the way into work today. He lives in Michigan. He says he's not going to vote, because he doesn't support either party, but even he admits that if Harris wins it probably won't be as ugly as if Trump does. That's because he thinks the Dems will riot. But then, he also thinks January 6th was an antifa thing. 😂