Oliver Twist
Today I was cleaning up my iPad trying to get rid of all those annoying little red bubbles indicating messages or notifications. You know the ones I’m talking about, we all have them on our phones and tablets and we most often try to keep them eliminated by looking at what we are being asked to look at. Whenever I get Kim’s phone in my hand (she uses her phone as a primary information device far more than I do), I notice and get agitated by the 4,000+ number in the red bubble on her email icon. I get to wondering if there is a digit maximum on those red notification bubbles. I always question her about that and ask her why she doesn’t do something about it. I never get a straight answer as to why it exists and why she can’t make it go away, so I have given up. I know she reads my emails and texts promptly and I know she reads a lot of incoming material and watches a lot of incoming podcasts and videos, but still that number sits there glaring at her every day and she has somehow learned to ignore it. If it were me I would have thrown the phone into the ocean long ago and just used it as an excuse to buy a new one. Then, when I set up the new phone, I would immediately cancel whatever email of mine was getting these thousands of messages and learn to live without it. But that hasn’t occurred to her or doesn’t appeal to her.
This morning there was a bold red 5 bubble on the YouTube icon. What causes that? How did YouTube suddenly come alive with notifications when it never had done before? These are the mysteries we all live with in the modern age. So I clicked on it to see what was what. It took me logically to the YouTube channel and the video that was teed up was the latest John Oliver Last Week Tonight on the subject of Mail-In Voting. It was, in a word, hilarious. I have always been a big fan of John Oliver since I like the blend of calm cool British logic with LOL swear-spiked admonition to the absurdity of the world around us and the people who inhabit it. I know I also like John Oliver since his views lean decidedly left of center and 95% of his craziness comments are directed squarely at Republicans and Trump. I like to think that this is less about John Oliver’s political bias than about the fact that in the crazy shit department, Trump and the Republicans are miles ahead of anybody else. This particular video takes the serious piss out of Jeanine Pirro and Tucker Carlson for their ridiculous comments about potential fraud in mail-in balloting. What I love is seeing John Oliver cite facts that completely undercut the absurdity of the statements from off-base pundits like Pirro and Carlson. He is like Woody Allen in Annie Hall when he brings Marshall McLuhan out from behind the poster to address the idiocy of the pontificant behind him in the movie line.
So let’s address the mail-in balloting issue for a moment. It is a perfect topic for John Oliver because it is, in fact, so very stupid. We’ve had mail-in balloting in the U.S. since the Civil War. The only real evidence is a study from Oregon which shows that something like .002% of the vote might represent wrongful votes (and even then there is no indication that it was Democrats or Republicans that caused the voting.). With COVID causing 5% of those infected (if recordation is accurate) to die, is that really a good trade-off, especially for poll-worker volunteers, who supposedly encounter 700 new people on a typical polling day? That is way more than the typical frontline healthcare worker and we have seen their infection rates be much higher than the normal citizenry. Add to that the average age of the poll volunteers and you have a very unreasonable exposure situation to prevent a very minimal possibility of mail-in fraud.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand that this is a primary tactic for the Republican Party, as it has been over the past twenty years. Voter suppression through Gerrymandering and other forms of voter restrictions ranging from procedural disinformation, restrictions on absentee voting, voter ID bureaucracy and all other forms of Jim Crowe nonsense. I find it incredible that in this day and age when even the DMV does most of its business online and through the mail, anyone would suggest that it is inappropriate to allow similarly ubiquitous and easy methods for people to cast their vote. With the ability of online databases to cross-check social security rosters for deaths and other official lists to exclude illegals from casting votes, it is indefensible to reject something as ancient and proven as mail-in balloting. The only argument one can conclude is that Republicans don’t want most people to vote because they understand that the demographic deck is stacked against them. Trump made that exact point verbalizing what the Republican Party wishes he had just kep to himself. Instead of reforming their platform to appeal to a broader swath of voters, they would rather go to the trouble of trying desperately to rig the electoral system.
They must realize that this is like trying to hold back the tide. Ultimately, the best they can do is prolong the inevitable, and at what cost? The first cost is their own credibility. The second and real worrisome cost is the full extent of our democracy. I hate to even think this, but maybe democracy also has a shelf-life and we are at the logical end of it. When the haves have all there is to have, perhaps democracy must give way to anarchy and rebellion and we have to start all over again and wade through the tribulations of totalitarianism until we can find our way out again to some new form of democratic republic. That is a harsh thought which I feel that even Republicans would not prefer. But what can they possibly be thinking in the view that voter suppression is a viable long-term strategy? Are they so scared of sharing their wealth that they will risk it all to clutch it to their breast? I keep hoping that some grain of reality will break through and that beacon of light will shine down on them and give then that “aha!” moment that we all sometimes need.
Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist as a series between 1837-1839 (In Netflix terms that would be two seasons of ten episodes). I see that the Audible audiobook of Oliver Twist runs over eighteen hours, so it fits the Netflix template. It was written as a social novel that purposefully depicted the harshness of the times in London with its thievery and its child labor issues. I’m betting that the harshness of Fagin would make the harshest of Republicans look like pussycats, so let us put all of this into context and recognize that as bad as Republican voter suppression may seem to you, me and John Oliver, we are not so far gone that shining a light on it in a Dickensian way might not help illuminate a few independent minds that are still open for consideration. I may have to start calling John Oliver, The Artful Dodger for so effectively twisting the tale of the mail-in voter.