As a resident of Palm Beach County since elementary school, here are my thoughts on the electoral hubbub here:
- It cannot be overemphasized that more than a quarter of a million Gore-supporters in Palm Beach County managed to decipher the demonized "Butterfly Ballot." (Alas, this disproves the theory that being a Democrat precludes rational thought.) As an admirer of Vladimir Nabokov, I take umbrage at this lepidopteran animus.
- Those who inadvertently voted for Pat Buchanan should have their suffrage suspended pending a literacy test. (Joke.)
- Jesse Jackson spoke in West Palm Beach against the Butterfly Ballot. Ipso facto, the Butterfly Ballot is legitimate. (Half-joking.)
- A pal of mine posited a correlation between the ballot-bunglers and the inability of many Palm Beach County motorists to distinguish a left lane from a right lane. My vehicular experience confirms this.
- The nineteen thousand who voted for both Gore and Buchanan might be sending a symbolic message: pro-abortion anti-interventionists?
- Who but babies kvetch for exemption from the expectations of citizenship? (To modify the lyric from Grease, "Literacy is the word.")
- Who but paternalists indulge such kvetching?
- Irving Howe wrote of the New Left's "politics of the kindergarten." Those in West Palm Beach chanting "Revote!" show countercultural puerility is alive and well.
- Robert Wexler should receive an Oscar for blathering.
- Gore campaign manager William Daley and attorney Kendall Coffey used the word "disenfranchised" to describe the cognitively impaired Palm Beach County voters. This is an insult to those who have truly felt the caste of disenfranchisement in American history. Let's keep in mind that we're dealing with a volitional error in the voting boothu2014the voting booth.
- Palm Beach County contains several excellent schools, libraries, bookstores, and a higher education system. You'd never guess it from this potentially pivotal idiocy.
November 11, 2000
Myles Kantor lives in Boynton Beach, Florida.
