Report: Wife Scratched Tiger Woods' Face, Chased His SUV; Update: Police Unable To Interview Couple Today
Senate Report: Bush Missed Chance To Catch Bin Laden
Bloomberg Spent $102 Million On Campaign
Two Doors Fall Off AirTrain At JFK
Dogs Rescued From Puppy Mills And Shelters Arrive In L.I.
On Sundays, Gothamist runs opinion pieces on issues relevant to life in New York. The views expressed below are solely those of the author.
This Tuesday Michael Bloomberg will be reelected Mayor of New York City. It is impossible, for all intents and purposes, for him to lose. But one can imagine a scenario where Bloomberg admits to, say, shoplifting all the time and the race becomes very close. One can even imagine looking into the future and finding out that the race is unsettled for weeks, with every ballot needing to be counted by hand.
In none of these scenarios will your vote make the slightest difference on the outcome.
The quintessential example used by Poli Sci profs is Bush/Gore, which “proves” that one vote can make a difference. One of the glories of being a professor is that you can say whatever you like, and your idiocy will be regarded as objective wisdom. They don’t have a giant Opinionist label at the tops of their talks; they are speaking as mentors to the uneducated. But if you think for a moment about the 2000 situation, even the dimmest among us can see that it proves the exact opposite. That election, the closest by far in US history, did not swing on one vote or even dozens. It was decided by hundreds, and hundreds that happened to be in one specific state. Even if I had, somehow, gotten everyone I knew to go to Florida and vote for Gore, the result would have been the same. My views would have been completely irrelevant.
I do hate to sound like a Marxist, but voting is perhaps a perfect example of self-indulgent bourgeois decadence. It would take, say, an hour for a person to go out and vote. Somewhere in the city there is a homeless man, maybe mentally ill but still a person, who is wondering where his next meal will be; somewhere there is an old woman who hasn’t gotten a phone call in over a year and would very much like someone’s company; somewhere there is a child who has never gotten a toy all his own; somewhere there is an abused dog who needs to be socialized or she will be put down. But none of them will be helped because some yuppies will be prefer to indulge in an antiquated political ritual.
People seem to think that it is important to make your voice heard in a free country. How anyone can hear you when you aren’t saying anything, I don’t know. How it is your voice that is heard when the ballot is secret, I do not claim to understand. Everyone votes in a dictatorship. When this country was at its freest, at its founding, virtually no one voted. There is not a positive correlation between suffrage and freedom.
I’m not saying that the alternative way to make your voice heard is to walk up and down the street with hundreds of other people, screaming. Nor am I saying that one cannot make a difference in politics. Obviously many, many people have done so. I’m merely saying that you probably won’t be one of them, and that’s perfectly fine. Nobody wants to think of themselves as irrelevant, but there are literally billions of people alive right now who will vanish from the world like evaporating water.
If you want to be a somebody, create something of great lasting value. Then take all the money you made from your creation—artistic, financial, or otherwise—and buy an office. Look at Corzine; he’s about to buy his second one. If being a Mayor or Senator is not your cup of tea, then take your fortune and buy a politician. Otherwise, do something productive with your time. The culture will thank you for it.
"Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story" will be published by Ballantine in March. He will apear at The Rejection Show on November 15th.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Right on. I hate my parents, too!!!!!!!!!
This piece is fairly muddled, I'm afraid. It makes two contradictory arguments, one of which is extremely far-fetched (that you should become a billionaire) and one of which is nihilistic, not to mention cliché (don't bother voting because it doesn't make a difference). No political science professor would be caught dead making such a facile claim as Malice attributes to them. Also, does he mean to argue that if people didn't vote, they'd spend that time helping the homeless, the elderly, orphans, and animals? This appeal to our sentimentaloid side is yet again in conflict with the underlying nihilism. Finally, calling voting "an antiquated political ritual" sounds fancy (to everyone except those who've gone to college for at least a year or ever picked up a textbook) but means nothing. I would have hoped the editor of one of my favorite websites would have had something more helpful or even substantive to say about the upcoming election.
when has gothamist ever been helpful about elections?
That is one of the most idiotic, snotty, protofascist pieces of dreck I've read in a long time.
And obviously "inspired by" (because we can't rightly say "plagiarized from") today's Freakonomics column in the Times magazine.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time studying economics will find this argument unsurprising and unobjectionable. Your vote really doesn't matter on anything other than a large-scale aggregate level -- so unless you control the votes of hundreds of thousands of other people in addition to your own, voting is a symbolic act. Nothing wrong with symbolism, but don't delude yourself that the symbolism is substantive.
And if we're callingn plagiarism here, the Freakonomics guy would be as guilty as anyone. This is an ancient, albeit correct, argument.
Read carefully. I wasn't calling plagiarism. I specifically said "we can't rightly say 'plagiarized from'".
I read carefully, and your first comment seemed disingenous -- that although we can't use the word "plagiarized," that's what you think is really going on. Sorry if that's not the case.
But you can't even "rightly say" it was inspired by today's Freakonomics column. People generally write columns with at least a little leeway in advance of publication, so this was probably written before the Freaknomics piece saw print.
Since it's election time, multiple authors are prone to write about electoral matters -- and it's likely that more than one of them will be influenced by an economic perspective, and therefore call BS on the common high-school-social-studies pieties about voting and civic duty that get parroted at every turn when the November polls roll around.
It's not a new argument, but there's nothing suspect about making it at generally the same time another author does. If anything, we need to hear this more often.
This sounds like the latest Republican strategy: get the fanatics mobilized, and make sure the vast majority is so disgusted and apathetic that they don't vote. Of course *one* vote doesn't count, but if you have enough like-minded people voting...
"Windy Appleseed" is awfully defensive of Michael Malice... might there be a connection? (Or perhaps they're the same person.)
I'm defensive of this particular argument.
I hear it all the time -- "Voting is your civic responsibility." "If you don't vote, don't complain." It's bogus. Everybody who has an interest in the political process should complain, raise a fuss, do whatever they can to make a difference. All the focus that people place on the act of voting is actually a distraction from the truth that almost anybody can be an activist of some sort, and make a difference on a practical level. But voting matters not at all except as symbolism.