| James N. Markels | ||||
|
|
Personal
Information Constitutionalist
Party Political/Policy
Writing Creative
Writing Resume |
by
James N. Markels If
I’ve counted correctly, this will be my 33rd, and last,
column for The Docket. I
haven’t missed an issue since my debut in October of 2001.
Since then I’ve written about everything from law-based TV
shows to the International Criminal Court, and I’ve enjoyed every
minute of it. So I figured
I would tie up a few loose ends—a prudential spring cleaning as it
were—on some of the topics I’ve kicked around in the past. For
example, in
October of 2002 I wrote about the elections in Iraq, where Saddam
Hussein got a miraculous 100 percent of the vote.
I concluded by noting, “and we need to do something about those
voting booths.” Well,
here we are in 2004 and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is arguing
that our voting system today is no better than it was in 2000.
Even where punchcards and lever machines have been replaced with
touch-screens, people aren’t being properly educated as to their use. With President Bush and Senator Kerry running neck and neck,
voters as polarized as ever, and every defect in the voting system
potentially being the margin of victory, are we heading toward a replay
of Election 2000 where the winner of the popular vote loses the
Electoral College? The odds are low, but Thomas Schaller, an assistant
professor of political science at University of Maryland Baltimore
County, sees the potential for Bush to suffer Gore’s fate in November.
In The Washington Post last week Schaller argued that
another result like in 2000 would prompt Americans to reconsider the
Electoral College system. That
would be a mistake. The
Electoral College recognizes that people have varying political stances
due to their physical location in the country: A city resident has
different political motives from the rural resident, as does a citizen
on the border compared to a citizen in the heart of the country, a
coastal resident from an inland resident, and so forth.
The chief executive, it is thought, should reflect the broad
needs of these residents, and not just one kind.
Schaller worries that the Electoral College has
marginalized the “safe” states—states already expected to vote for
one candidate—and made everything depend on crucial “swing”
states. However, the voters
in the “swing” states are quite diverse.
You’ve got inland rural “swing” states like West Virginia
and Tennessee, as well as the more urban, coastal, border “swing”
state of Florida and the hodge-podge “swing” state of Ohio, for
example. Going to a popular
vote system would marginalize the spread-out inland rural voters and
make everything depend on the city voters, especially in the big coastal
cities like D.C., New York, and Los Angeles.
Why waste your time in low-population-density areas when you get
more bang for your buck stumping in cities?
Our presidents would start to only reflect the desires of city
folk, to the detriment of the rest of the country.
In January
of 2003 I wrote about a man who had changed his name to Jack Ass and
then sued MTV’s parent company, Viacom, over their show “Jackass.”
At the time I wrote, “I just can’t see it being equitable to knowingly change one’s
name to an epithet, and then suing others for using that epithet in its
common usage for profit.” Mr.
Ass represented himself pro se in the lawsuit, which was transferred to
a federal district court and then dismissed.
Sadly, in August of 2003, Mr. Ass committed suicide, perhaps in
part because of the dismissal. His
Hearts Across America campaign is still around, though, to place
“healing hearts” at the scenes of fatal drunk-driving accidents.
In that same column, I wrote about the
infamous German cannibal, Armin Meiwes, who at the time was headed to
trial for killing and eating Bernd Juergen Brandes.
Meiwes met Brandes through a personals ad that read, “Gay male
seeks hunks 18-30 for slaughter,” and Brandes apparently wanted very
much to be killed and eaten. To
me this looked like assisted suicide—albeit incredibly outlandish and
twisted—so I wondered “why is Armin considered a criminal?”
In the end, Meiwes did go to jail, but
not for murder. Earlier
this year, the amazing trial concluded with Meiwes getting 8½ years for
manslaughter, leaving him eligible for parole in about 5½ years.
“I had my big kick and I don’t need to do it again,” said
Meiwes, who has promised to write his memoirs during his incarceration. Finally, recent events in Iraq have me returning to my very
first column for The Docket, where I argued that nation
building in Afghanistan would have to be on the Afghanis’ terms, not
ours. I wrote, “Wiping
out a government that sponsors terrorism tells the successors what not
to do in the strongest possible fashion, and that’s the important
thing. What form of government the Afghans settle on—so long as it
heeds our warning—is not. Yes, we’d prefer a republic with equal
rights for all, but between Zahir Shah, the Alliance, existing Afghan
culture, and the multitude of other would-be leaders, it’s not going
to happen soon, no matter how much threat we employ.”
As
I see news of the recent uprisings orchestrated by Shiite Muslim cleric
Moqtada Sadr and the flare of instability in the country, I wonder if
we’d simply be better off letting the Iraqis sort out their government
by themselves rather than endure our “help.”
One danger of this would be that the Shiite majority would
probably take out violent retribution against the Sunni minority that
had oppressed the Shiites for so long under Hussein.
The whole point in carefully crafting a new democratic
constitution was to prevent this. But
currently, Americans are only serving as the scapegoats for Iraq’s
problems. Whatever
government is forged in Iraq must come from the Iraqis if it is to last,
and our best intentions simply won’t change that.
This isn’t a Vietnam-like situation—we’re not even at a
tenth of the casualty rate—but come June 30th, when Bush
has planned to turn over authority, we should leave and let Iraqis face
their future alone. |
||
