Monday, November 15, 2010

Politics without politicians

Satirist P.J. O'Rourke has a novel solution for what ails us: let’s try politics without the politicians.

He writes:
We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there.

In a free country government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference. The teacher is a pompous twit. Our child is a lazy pain in the ass. We undertake this social obligation with weary reluctance. And we only do it at all because the teacher (political authority) deserves cold stares, hard questions, and maybe firing, and the pupil (that portion of society which, alas, needs governing) deserves to be grounded without TV and have its Internet access screened and its allowance docked.
It is rather curious that most politicians come from that endless gene pool of preening, glad-handing, emotionally needy, student body presidents that we all detested in high school. O’Rourke’s dream is a lovely one. Too bad we have to wake up.

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