A friend called
recently to unburden herself about The Election Crisis 2000. She
said that Gore is trying to steal the presidency with his phony
baloney accusations and his legalistic tricks. She said she couldn’t
believe this is happening in the land of the free and the home of
the brave.
"What
is this?" I thought. "A real, live adult taking the Gore-Bush
slapstick seriously? She sounds distraught. *Gasp* Do you suppose
she thought that elections were, well, fair?"
I decided to
validate her feelings and offer consolation.
"Yeah,
it’s really a scream, ain’t it? Don’t worry. Pretty soon one of
the Big Boys will pull Al aside and tell him to knock it off. It’ll
be over by January 19th anyway."
Somehow, I
don’t think I helped her feel any better. Actually, I don’t think
she heard me at all. She went on, clearly still in distress.
"I’ve
been walking around in a daze. The TV is on all day long. Cathy,
what do we tell our children?"
Without much
sympathy I replied, "You’re a homeschool mom, aren’t you? Look
at this as a great opportunity for a learning experience. Design
a unit study."
We put our
heads together and developed this list of projects, offered here
as a guide, a starting point, really, for your homeschool. We call
it "Elections, American-style."
Political
Science: Have an Election at Your House
Pick two children
to run against each other. Dress one in a suit and tie, the other
in a polo shirt and dockers. For a week prior to the election, have
them canvas the neighborhood promising all the neighbors a share
of daddy’s income in exchange for their vote. Your candidates must
take credit for every positive thing that happens on your block
and blame excessive consumerism, the unfettered market and unfair
foreign trade for everything that goes wrong. Make sure they know
to not answer a single question, and if cornered, lie. Designate
Granny, who is nearly blind with cataracts and hard of hearing,
as the polling booth official. On the day of the election, have
your candidates slip everyone a pack of cigarette and $5. After
the votes are cast, count them: there should be more ballots than
voters. Now the whining begins. We suggest that the youngest in
your family lose, since the quality and quantity of the whining
will be nonpareil. Both candidates should then go to mommy and demand
that she pick the winner.
Social Studies:
Analyze the News Coverage
Turn on the
national news every evening. Have your children count how many times
they hear the phrase, "the will of the people." Have a
contest to see who can repeat that phrase in the best deep, resonant
and impeccably serious tone without laughing. Come up with a list
of softball questions for the candidates. Make sure they include,
"How do you feel right now?"
Language
Arts
Use the words
chad and snippy in a sentence.
Solve the word
puzzle below: change Gore to Bush in six steps by changing one letter
at a time. Each line should be a word.
G O R E
__ __ __ __
__ __ __ __
__ __ __ __
__ __ __ __
__ __ __ __
B U S H
Science:
Entomology
Make a chart
of the life cycle of the Florida butterfly ballot.
History:
Pristine Elections is American History
Define these
terms: gerrymander, poll tax, political machine.
Research the
elections during the Civil War. How did suspending habeas corpus,
spying on and jailing war dissenters, intercepting the mail and
telegraphs, interferring with the press and maintaining martial
law in the Border States effected the results of those elections?
How do you think soldiers who had to sign their names to their ballots
voted? The employees of the burgeoning federal bureaucracy?
Who was Boss
Tweed? DeWit Clinton? Richard Daley? Were political machines effective?
If so, do you think they are no longer in existence?
Research the
presidential election of 1960? Is it true that Illinois and Texas
are the only two states that allow voting via seance?
Extra Credit
– What is walking around money? And why haven’t I ever gotten
any?
Advanced Topic
– How does including in the franchise people who receive government
paychecks–any variety including social security welfare, military
pay welfare, defense industry welfare, public school welfare, scientific
research welfare, as well as plain vanilla welfare – effect
not only the results of elections but the ethos of the voting population?
Advanced Topic,
Extra Credit – After reading Walter Karp’s Indispensable
Enemies, the most important book on American politics ever
penned, answer the following question: who in their right mind would
ever be silly enough to think that a Bush defeat would lead to the
demise of the Republican Party?
Tell ‘Em What Elections Are Really for
Now, here’s
an assignment for all you distraught parents, walking around in
a daze – a stiff dose of reality. Click on this link to Murray
Rothbard’s essay, "The
Anatomy of the State." In it you will find the following
passage:
As Bertrand
de Jouvenel has sagely pointed out, through the centuries men
have formed concepts designed to check and limit the exercise
of State rule; and, one after another, the State, using its intellectual
allies, has been able to transform these concepts into intellectual
rubber stamps of legitimacy and virtue to attach to its decrees
and actions. Originally, in Western Europe, the concept of divine
sovereignty held that the kings may rule only according to divine
law; the kings turned the concept into a rubber stamp of divine
approval for any of the kings’ actions. The concept of parliamentary
democracy began as a popular check upon absolute monarchical rule;
it ended with parliament being the essential part of the State
and its every act totally sovereign.
So there you
have it. The safeguards put in place to check state power are ultimately
used by the state to legitimize and extend its power. And so it
goes with elections, from the coup d’etat that saddled us
with the Constitution of 1787, to the rise to power of the American
Caligula – elections in the good ol’ US of A are no different
from those of any other banana republic. Somewhere during those
dark days of your government schooling, you must have come across
the quotation, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts
absolutely." That’s how all this can happen in the land of
the free and the home of the brave. Quite obviously, voting is neither
a check on government power nor in any way a measure of the will
of the people. It is a mind game meant to engender in us the warm,
fuzzy feeling that we are part of something really important. Elections
are a clever ruse for suckers to whom flag waving and the Pledge
of Allegiance mean something.
So now, finally,
like Helen Keller kneeling at the water pump in The Miracle Worker,
you know.
And what should
my friend tell her children? The same thing I told mine – the
truth, damn it. Always, tell them the truth.
December
13, 2000
Cathy
Cuthbert is a wife, mother and homeschool advocate living in California.
Look for more unit studies at her new web project, deschooling.org,
coming in the next few weeks. She can be reached at deschoolcuthbert@aol.com.
