un-uniquely unqualified

I've yet to vote in a US election. In 1996 I was 3 months (& change) too young. In 2000 I hadn't registered to vote, although I stayed up with one of my college housemates long enough on election night to leave a note on the table saying "Bush won." We would have done better to go to bed, although Dan Rather's malapropish similes were rather amusing. For 2004 I contrived to be out of the country on Election Day. I did, however, cast a primary ballot in person earlier in the season, so technically I would have been able to vote by mail. Quite frankly, I didn't care.

Judging from US Census figures, I'm hardly alone in my apathy. You wouldn't know it for the year-and-a-half of media hype that is the US electoral process, but 36% of eligible voters did not vote in the 2004 election. [126m of 197m eligible voters cast ballots.] Compare that the other great American tradition: the Super Bowl. Foreign intelligence indicates that 'well over 141m people in the US watched at least six minutes of the game.' The pre-event domestic figure suggested 64% would 'take part in this yearly tradition'. Given that the US population is nearing 300m, that's a smaller percentage, I know; but I think you could still make the case that American Democracy® is as concerned with football as politics. [If not more so: the Super Bowl happens every year. Nor would I expect that large numbers of people wake up Wednesday after Election Day with a hangover.]

Some times I've considered shaping my apathy into a more principled form: taking a measured stance on issues and not voting accordinly. I'd be in more distinguished company if I'd arrived at my inaction honestly. I guess I have trouble accepting the idea that government exists to do good, siding instead with the darker interpretation of Churchill's quip:

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Of the available issues, I could get most worked up about the environment. In the American political landscape, this means "global warming", and the choices, for me as a voter, are absurd. One party pretends that there is no problem, and no reliable scientific data about the non-existent problem. The other party is rabid to sign international treaties to establish protocols that will have no effective impact--save economic cost--over the long term. What room is there for someone like myself who trusts the scientific data pointing towards global warming, but believes Bjorn Lomborg's argument that it would be a far more cost-effective (and more just) use of available resources to raise the standard of living in the world's poorer countries? Come Election Day, no room whatsoever; nuance has no place in a two-party system.

Anyhow, I'm considering breaking my streak to vote in the upcoming Congressional elections this year, as much as I hate having no option to express my dissatisfaction with the evil governing party except by rewarding the other party--who are also evil, though powerless--with a vote. [This being East TN, there's no chance that a Democrat could be elected; I'd have to count on the dimished margin of victory to make a statement.] Really, I'd like to take the Republican party behind the woodshed and give them a good whupping. Or start an anarchist uprising. But when the so-called party of fiscal conservatism starts spending money like it's the end of the world on bridges in Alaska to increase relatives' land values, I have to settle for voting in the Democrats to blow my tax dollars on religiously-insensitive art. At least handing money over to the NEH produces something worth an aesthetic reaction.