Voting - It's What's For Dinner

Old friend/editor Alan Wirzbicki writes in the New Republic Online on the futility of those "voting is cool" drives to encourage youth voting in the US. Makes a good point:

... as non-partisan groups, these outfits all promote voting for voting's sake, and stay away from endorsing candidates or anything but the most vague causes ("change," "justice").

Maybe I travel in cynical circles, but I have never met anyone who votes solely out of an abstract sense of civic responsibility.

Makes sense to me. Never quite understood how "rock the vote" or "choose or lose" worked without any appeal to the value of the political process to the would-be voter. I suppose campaigns can make voting cool (debatable), but ultimately it has to motivate someone to drag her butt down to the polling station.

Edit: Apparently, according to James Wolcott, in so linking, I've just perpetuated the "Harvard Crimson-Washington Monthly-New Republic brain trust".

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

English words that are borrowed from Malay

I really like studying etymology and the origins of words, and I'm interested in the fairly omnivorous nature of English, which has a huge "borrowed" vocabulary. (Random fact: "bugger" is related to "Bulgaria".) So I thought every now and then I'd put up random lists of words English borrows from various languages - well, besides French, German, and Spanish, or I'll exhaust myself from typing. I thought I'd start with Malay, national language of Singapore. Wikipedia already has a partial list , but I thought I'd come up with a list that also included a few other loan words. The obvious ones are words for things that are indigenous to the region - plants (durian, rambutan, bamboo, sago, camphor ), animals (orang-utan, pangolin, cassowary), and cloth ( gingham , sarong). But there's a whole bunch that're less obvious, even to native English speakers from this region: amok . If you asked me to name one English loan word that'
Read more

50 Cent's crib

This New York Times article on 50 Cent's life in the sleepy suburb of Farmington, Conn. , is quite wry - But a cook at China Palace said Mr. Jackson could save 10 percent on any order over $30... Ah, the privileges of fame... 10% off Chinese takeout! For the party, Mr. Jackson ordered more than $5,000 worth of liquor, including "a lot of Baccardi," according to the owner of a Farmington liquor store who spoke on the condition of anonymity "to protect his privacy." Sipping Bacardi (ooh, caught a Times misspelling) like it's his birthday. How anonymous could a liquor store owner in a suburban town be? It's not like there're hundreds of liquor stores in the town, I'm guessing. I like how they keep referring to him as Mr. Jackson...
Read more