That Carl Guy

Through Mustang Bobby in a post in his BarkBarkWoofWoof I became aware of the paragraph below from a NY Times editorial by Gail Collins, in which she eloquently expressed the same view that Mustang Bobby had, about the sad situation that the caucuses of a lightly populated state like Iowa appear to matter more than those of many larger states, just because their first shots in the Presidential candidates popularity contest happen to come later.

Tonight, the Iowa Deciders will divide into 1,781 local caucuses. Past history suggests that a few of these gatherings may not draw any attendees whatsoever and that several others will consist entirely of a guy named Carl. Attendance has no effect on the number of delegates involved, and we hardly need mention that the whole thing is weighted to give rural residents an advantage. Iowans in politically active neighborhoods where 100 people show up may find their vote is worth only 1 percent as much as, say, Carl’s. This gives them the opportunity to experience what it is like to be a New Yorker or Californian all year round.

You will have no trouble deducing why that passage drew so much of my attention and gratitude. As I commented to another post by Mustang Bobby, those Carl guys are doing their bit toward carrying on the voting process that is supposed to help make this country great, while his local colleagues are choosing to be lax about the whole thing and instead are staying home and gobbling pizza, though they must know that the eyes of all the other voting parts of the country are upon them, and instead they just get ol' reliable Carl, though that, in the immortal words of Lenny Bruce, isn't all bad.

I would never want my vote to matter as much as 100 or even 2 others, but I can't help appreciating the irony there, because when I was young, my vote had the precise value of zero. For a while as a citizen of the Nation's Capital, I wasn't allowed to vote for the President at all, or for the city's mayor or anything else. Instead, until D.C. later got a still unfair measure of home rule, it was and still is under the thumb of various reprobate Congressmen, who come and go and have no stake at all in what goes on beyond the gray and white limits of the Federal districts. And meanwhile in large areas of the rest of the country people had to march, suffer, and sometimes die before I and others of my hue had the right to go to the polling places and safely and without any nonsense do our U.S. citizen thing.

Even today, when I vote, which is whenever I am supposed to, without fail, I can't forget a man who proudly spoke of how happy he was to cast his ballot in the opposite direction and so cancel my vote -- a man of my same age but who unlike me, had had the advantage of being born with the color that always allowed him to vote with no questions asked, a man who, for instance, has fought tooth and nail to successfully avoid ever having to fulfil his civic duty as a juror, while I have reported to serve on juries whenever called.

It's personally interesting also that Ms Collins picked the same name as mine when I recall my experience in serving in caucuses, here in rural Virginia, some years ago when I was politically active, because I always thought they were the weirdest part of all in the political process. It's so ...so ...I can't find the right word. ...It's so irregular ..raggedy.

In our case, as Democratic committee people, we would do nothing except group together in different spots in the same large courthouse room, according to the candidate we liked, and we would be counted, and that would be it, and to me it had all the air of nothing more than an elementary school playground event.

Maybe that was why Ms Goodwin made such dire predictions about the attendance in Iowa. I don't know if she was right, but if she was, then we should thank goodness at least for all those dedicated dudes with my name. Right?