A Great Opportunity for a Learning Experience

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 [email protected].