FROM “WHO IS YOUR PRESIDENT?”
Each State would appoint a number of young men and women (say, five or six), who would be called, say, Choosers. These men and women would be law majors, recent graduates of local universities, young enough not to be corrupted by political plotting. The Choosers would have the same qualities as your future President, i.e. intelligence, honesty, and decency. Armed with modern technology, using Internet resources freely, they would select two, three, or four candidates from each state for your consideration.
Suppose we’re talking about Colorado. Having a pretty clear idea of their home State’s demographics, the five Choosers would run a few surveys. Being sociable, as many young people tend to be, they would be able to contact folks from every walk of life. Denver, the capital of Colorado, has three universities, an opera theatre, a number of museums of national importance; there is the famous Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs; there are observatories and world-famous ski resorts in the Rockies. The vast meadows serve as pastures for hundreds of thousands of cattle. The minerals include molybdenum, coal, oil, and gas. All in all, it’s a pretty good place for intelligent, energetic folks to utilize their skills, and such people are invariably in the public eye. It would take the five Choosers only a week or two, tops, to select some candidates from their number – five, or eight, maybe. In other, more populous, states, such as New York, California, or Washington, the number could be higher – ten or fifteen candidates. Once the selection process is complete, all Choosers would convene in a conference room on Capitol Hill, from which outsiders would be barred. There would be roughly three hundred Choosers (representing the fifty-one States). With the help of a unified computer system, the Choosers would integrate the faults and merits of all five hundred candidates (roughly). As young people tend to be temperamental, spirited debates among the Choosers would then follow, resulting in the selection of, roughly, five candidates altogether (a larger number might confuse some voters). This would be followed by the actual election process, which would begin with public assessment of the selected candidates: a televised test.
We should remember at this point that even though the proposed system is better than the current model, it is far from ideal. The main thing, however, is for the voter to realize the urgency of altering the existing system. It is the most important political issue in your country today.
After the four or five candidates have been introduced to the public (on your TV screen), after their names have been announced and their biographical data and earlier careers detailed for you, a session would follow during which each candidate would have to answer questions in front of millions of viewers. The questions would cover various areas of human knowledge. Strict measures would be taken to make sure that none of the candidates knows the questions beforehand, the way it is done in some TV trivia shows.
Here are some sample questions a candidate would have to answer:
1. In what year was Julius Caesar killed?
2. How much does an average cabdriver in Cincinnati pay for his lunch? How much does his lunch cost a Manhattan cabdriver?
3. Name the main points President George W. Bush made in his speech immediately following September Eleven.
4. Take this notepad. Here’s a pen. Write down Einstein’s energy formula.
5. What is the yearly salary of an average physician in the State of Montana?
6. Which NBA team won the championship last year?
7. Name the approximate yearly state budget of Louisiana.
8. Pick up that pen again. Write down the first line of Lord Byron’s poem Manfred.
9. What is the top speed of today’s most technologically advanced American fighter plane? And the bomber’s speed?
10. Show the candidate a Boticelli painting and a Giotto painting. Ask him to name the authors.
11. What is the population of Thailand?
12. What hockey team do you root for?
14. Let the candidate listen to two fragments from symphonies by Mozart and Prokofieff. Ask him whether he can distinguish between the two different styles. Name the styles. Name the composers.
15. How many soldiers do we have in Iraq right now?
16. In what century did Jewish Christians and Jewish traditionalists started to draw away from one another?
17. How many kilowatts of electrical energy does America consume on a daily basis? Which part of this energy is supplied by nuclear power plants? Hydro? Coal-powered plants?
18. What is the approximate amount of money an average retiree receives from his pension plan in Denver, Colorado? In New York?
19. Describe the basic principle of the National Missile Defense. How does it work?
20. What percentage of the population is engaged in agriculture in the United States? In Canada? In Iran?
21. Name two of your favorite American writers. Name two of your favorite foreign writers.
22. Show the candidate a few photographs of famous actors and actresses. Let him tell which ones, in his opinion, are the sexiest.
23. In the State of Oklahoma, how many people are unemployed as we speak?
24. What tools does a plumber use in order to repair a faucet leak? What would he use to unclog a toilet?
25. Who is today’s best Wagnerian tenor?
26. What is your favorite city?
27. Show us your handkerchief. (This might sound absurd to some folks. However, the state of one’s handkerchief shows how it is used. If the handkerchief is carefully folded (or absent), it would suggest that its owner uses paper tissues instead. One way or the other, such seemingly insignificant details can reflect one’s cultural level and/or upbringing).
There should be over a hundred such questions.
Over a hundred? Wouldn’t that be too many? No.
No candidate should be able to answer all of them. It wouldn’t be necessary, either. Failure to answer certain types of questions would be indicative of, not just the candidate’s erudition, but his character, outlook, and taste as well. The voter ought to know whom he’s voting for, be familiar with all kinds of stuff about his candidate. It might take three or four broadcasts to show the entire session. After that, a few days would be allowed for discussions and debates – in the media, naturally, but mostly among the voters themselves – in the street, at the local diner, in the neighborhood bar, at home, face-to-face, or over the phone. Private funding of election campaigns should be banned outright (and anyway, the method we have just described would eliminate the need for it). Spending millions on presidential campaigns creates an illusion that Presidency can be bought. Such an illusion is humiliating for democratic society.
FROM “THE PHANTOM INDUSTRY”
What is the Phantom Industry? Look around you. You are standing in the middle of it - the ultimate economic phenomenon of our epoch, a sociopolitical entity that employs and benefits, in one way or another, as much as 80% of the American workforce and has branches and outposts throughout the world.
It has a brief yet stormy history.
FROM “CRISIS AT THE OPERA”
Up until the end of the Eighteenth Century, all operas were performed in Italian. The Italians were regarded as the founders of the genre. Various Italian touring companies helped maintain this view. During the following century, however, theatres around the world began to translate the libretti, including those written in Italian, into the languages of their own countries. To hear opera in an unfamiliar language is to hear it without the lyrics.
FROM “GENES, MEMES, AND EVOLUTIONARY PERILS”
The Selfish Gene opens with a postulate one is expected to take on faith (Dawkins presents no evidence, not even circumstantial evidence, in this case other than the oft-repeated assertion that “it had to happen by definition,” rephrasing it elegantly each time) to the effect that today’s overall condition of the Universe is the direct result of something he calls the survival of the stable. There is something about this theory resembling the thought process of another Chekhov character who states that “the moon is far more important than the sun, since the sun only shines during the day when there’s plenty of light anyway.”
A great deal of Dawkins’ terminology is revealing. Thus, for instance, he uses the word belief rather recklessly. Consider:
“I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. I stress this, because I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case.” (p. 3).
Or:
“Before that I must argue for my belief that the best way to look at evolution is in terms of selection occurring at the lowest level of all. In this belief I am heavily influenced by G. C. Williams’s great book Adaptation and Natural Selection.” (p. 11)
We’re certainly dealing with a believer here, don’t you think?
FROM “WHY TV PERFORMS FELLATIO”
Television as we know it (not the tube itself, but rather the broadcasting industry) dates back to the 1950’s, when the main purpose of advertising was to announce products rather than splice their brand names onto the human psyche. We have come a long way since then. Only a few products can be advertised in prime time today. Cars; pharmaceuticals (including dental products and shampoo, i.e. stuff you buy at the drugstore); junk food; new movies; cell phones, lawyer services; and insurance. Gone from your evening TV experience are department stores, appliances, coffee, music, and painting collections. Ah, the time when you could catch a commercial touting a huge sale on Manet or Sargent originals! Those were the days.
But I digress.
Even back in the 1950’s, some folks cynically suggested that television was an advertising medium, and that the actual programming served only to fill the gaps between commercials. That was not true back than; nor is it true today. The reason television performs fellatio is far more prosaic, alas.
The current model for TV broadcasting consists of two layers of pseudo-advertising, and nothing else. The first layer, i.e. the actual programming (shows, concerts, movies, news) serves to get the viewer’s attention. The second layer, the “commercials,” does not actually try to sell anything (in prime time, they run up to eight car ads an hour – how many cars can an average viewer possibly buy in the course of just one day, goodness – how often does he or she actually buy a car? Once in two or three or five years? At four hours of TV per day, and a brand-new car every three years (quite a stretch) – that comes out to 35,040 (thirty-five thousand and forty) car ads between purchases!). Rather, the “commercial” layer tries (successfully so, we must admit) to keep viewers’ minds in car-buying mode all the time.
The studios pay for the shows, and the advertisers pay the studios. The actual viewer is kept out of the loop.
This may be a wonderful (and witty) solution for providing free entertainment for the public, only there is no such thing as free lunch (case in point: the philosopher’s stone enterprise and perpetual motion research still have to yield any results). The studios have no choice but to bring the overall quality of the programming to the lowest common denominator in order to get as many folks as possible to watch TV. The model has no provision for the specialized interests of some viewers, niche programming, demographic-oriented programming. A show that could potentially attract fewer than a million viewers (roughly speaking) gets rejected more or less automatically.
Cable was expected to balance out the “dumb-down” factor by making the viewer pay actual money for the packages he or she purchased. The model used by cable television, however, differs but little from traditional TV. The viewer pays a ridiculously small monthly sum and is served a whole bunch of channels featuring shows that are not of the viewer’s choosing. The quality is only marginally better than that of the big networks. As an acquaintance of mine once put it, “There’s 500 channels and nothing to watch.”
The crux of the matter is that both models are essentially anti-free-enterprise and, in the final count, stubbornly and aggressively un-American. Which is a shame, of course, since modern technology can easily make television a truly wonderful source of quality entertainment for everyone, and not just the “masses.” Yes, there is a way to make TV perform fellatio less, and do some quality work for the good of the American people.
What I’m going to say now may sound nearly unthinkable, and even ridiculous, to some taxpayers and voters out there. It is nevertheless true.
Here goes. It is the Federal Government’s job to rescue television from the clutches of corporate-sponsored, watered-down socialism.
