Thought for the Week <http://www.rawilson.com/main.html> by Robert Anton Wilson 8 As 128 Era Pataphysique for Col. Hugh Romney, USAF [ret.] - [aka Wavy Gravy] I have never enjoyed an election more, or had my animal spirits raised higher by the results. I feel, in short, just like I did in Berlin the week before the Wall came down: a quantum jump seems about to happen. My perennial candidate, Nobody, scored another stunning victory. The majority of citizens simply ignored the Gush/Bore/TSOG* Control Machine, and "voted for Nobody," i.e. didn't vote at all. Unlike alienated artists of the past, I belong to the majority party, the millions who looked over the candidates and decided they trusted Nobody. According to the latest [wobbly] figures, since Gush and Bore each got the vote of [roughly] 25% of the eligible voters, and Nobody got the vote of [roughly] 50%, then Nobody won. Adding the "protest votes" for Nader, Browne etc., Nobody won even bigger, around 55%. since in this carefully rigged system, third party votes are, in effect, votes for Nobody. The people who voted for those "minority" candidates certainly didn't expect them to win; they just expressed their contempt for the 2 Lying Bastards more actively than those of us who just stayed home, got stoned and looked at Three Stooges videos. I celebrate the majority with Whitmanesque rhapsody. The so-called Elite, specifically, the of 1% who own damn near everything, especially the politicians and the media spent THREE BILLION DOLLARS on this malign fiesta and still couldn't convince most of us that a choice between two over-rouged old whores like Gush and Bore matters a damn. A few hours ago, I heard a pundit on CNN announce that whoever enters the White House on 20 January 2001 will know that "half the country" regards him as a fraud and usurper. As usual, the media got the facts wrong; they ignored the landslide 55% who chose Nobody. Whichever Lying Bastard enters the White House that day will seem a fraud and usurper to 80% of the country, the 25% who prefer the other Lying Bastard + the 55% who prefer Nobody. This seems wonderful to me. Liberty can survive only as long as most people distrust their government, and falls into decline and the "sickness unto death " whenever the people trust a government too damn much. Besides, I think it's time to abolish politicians entirely and let everybody participate in self-government via Internet. We needed representatives in the 18th Century, because we couldn't all go to Washington. Meanwhile, times changed and our "representatives" have sold us out to the corporations, as we in the majority party all agree, whatever our differences in other matters. And we don't need "representatives" anymore; we have the Net technology to represent ourselves. In that evolutionary sense, every vote for Nobody really represents a vote for Everybody. ---- *TSOG [Tsarist Occupation Government] <http://www.rawilson.com/prethought.html#tsog> According to a widely discussed article by Seymour Hersh [The New Yorker, May 22, 2000, pp. 49-82] our current Tsar [Gen. Barry McCaffrey] seems guilty of war crimes under the Nuremberg rules. This surprises me about as much as the news that the Pope lists his religious affiliation as Catholic, or that furry mammals of the ursine family perform their excretory functions in sylvan environments. Bill Clinton may be 77 kinds of sonofabitch, as most of us think, but he's no fool. When he picks a Tsar, he finds the right sort of man for the job. But with the march of technology, and the almost daily announcements of new marvels and monstrosities of genetic engineering Bore or Gush might surpass him; they might dig up the bones and clone Ivan the Terrible.
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