I
voted for this book. There were more than 26 characters on the ballot. I voted 40,000 times. Voting for a president should be at least as hard as this.
HOW TO VOTE
A MANUAL
by
A Manual
VOTE AGAINST YOUR INSTINCTS
DON’T VOTE
TIPS FOR THE APATHETIC
LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD
OH SHIT
A PARADE OF CLOUDS, CLOWNS, COWBOYS, CARTOONS, AND COWARDS.
SURGE
IT’S FREE
ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU?
LET’S NOT FORGET THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE
DON’T EVEN JOKE ABOUT NOT VOTING
Some fucked-up shit gone wrong up in this bitch
“a shared vision of a common good”
VOTE NAKED
WHAT KIND OF BALLOT DID THEY GIVE YOU?
I, Max Winchester, VOTE TO LOSE 80 POUNDS
a good health care system
THAT WAS ME
FOR MEN ONLY
SUCK UP
SUCKER
DRESS UP FOR ELECTION DAY
I FORGOT TO MENTION THAT BILLIONAIRES MIGHT BE SOMEHOW IMPORTANT IN THIS PROCESS
DON’T GET ME WRONG
VOTE IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD
Me too
HA
IT’s LIKE THAT
BANG
“THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS”
SNORTING COKE AND BEING FUCKED BY WILD RHINOS
RALPH NADER!
VOTE FOR SATAN
I WAS JUST KIDDING
WRECKED
VOTING FOR JOHN KERRY WAS JUST LIKE THAT
WHAT ABOUT MY PENSION?
FUCK FONTS
MUSES ARE FUSES
“AMERICA”
I FELL FOR THE COLD WAR
I’D LIKE TO VOTE, PLEASE
WHAT ENEMIES?
VOTE LIKE YOU’RE PLANTING A SEED
UNZIP YOUR HEART
I THINK I’VE FIGURED OUT THE PROBLEM
SO I’VE CANCELED THE ELECTION
CALL ME ELITIST
OR...
LIKE THIS FUCKING BOOK
V
OTE AGAINST YOUR INSTINCTS. Peel off your bumper stickers, yank the signs from your yard. Let them know you’re a loose cannon, a maverick citizen who can’t be reasoned with or manipulated through loyalty. Vote without strategy. Vote to protest: Votest. Vote to threaten, to tickle, to embarrass, to streak unencumbered and uninhibited through the whitewashed walls of government. Vote again and again, screaming as you’re cut by the razor’s edge between agony and bliss. Vote with your heart, your spleen, your ovaries, your wiener. Grunt. Get into full-frontal voting. Vote gasping, spewing juices. Vote like a motherfucker. Vote as if it were almost too late to do any good.
D
ON’T VOTE. You will be missed. You’ll raise suspicions, hurt feelings, undermine enormous campaigns costing the equivalent of thousands of new schools. You’ll sabotage the election, send a clear message, cast doubt on the process, trigger a recount, insurrect, invoke revolution. The candidates will come to your doorstep with tears in their eyes pleading for you to reconsider, to not let your country down. You tell them that democracy is an enormous greasy iron-armored warship crawling out of the harbor into international waters, and to poke loose a chad would be to fling a single piece of confetti in celebration at the majestic dirty sight of it plowing through the roiling, oil-scummed seas on its way to occupy foreign lands whose histories are not taught in our schools. At which their eyes will brighten, and they will say, “Yes, yes, that is such a beautiful image! Throw that confetti!”
T
IPS FOR THE APATHETIC. Pretend. Contrive a scenario to overwrite the process. You aren’t voting for your candidate, you’re throwing a pie at their opponent. It’s not a voting booth, it’s a dunk tank. Your vote is a well-thrown baseball sending the impeccable-suit-wearing political clown down into an icy cauldron of humiliation. Their careers will be ruined when word gets out that you voted against them. It’s not just about the vote, it’s the gesture. There is a curtain on the booth but do you really believe there isn’t a hidden camera? How could there not be a hidden camera? It’s your show: for a moment you are America—every TV channel, every stage, every podium and flashbulb—as the globe and future turn on the axis of your hole-punching tool. Make a speech. Pull up your shirt, pull down your pants. Show some skin. Watch their eyes when you come out of the booth and tell me there isn’t a hidden camera.
V
ote. LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD. Wait. Better idea: scream. Keep screaming. Let your voice be heard.
O
H SHIT. What if I vote for the wrong guy? The Easter-eggshell-innocent-smooth-and-hollow rhetorical generalizations shatter into razorous shards delivering savage lacerations from the fractured rubble and broken bottles in the vacant lots of unbuilt schools and clinics, endless wars justified by flimsy, forgotten, illogical premises which our children’s children won’t even be taught. For the super rich, tax cuts; for the criminally rich, the capitol dome spews a green vomit of bailout. Bars and handcuffs for the street-level entrepreneur, gas and spray for the street-protest policymaker. I could fuck up a lot of people with this. I don’t want to vote for the wrong guy. Fucking thing is, I can’t tell the goddamn di⁄erence between those fuckers.
T
he Democrats have two things going for them: they aren’t the Republican party, and they sometimes win elections. But let’s take a close look at that first statement. The Democrats stand for a foreign policy limited to increasing a taxpayer-funded budget for escalating violence. Their gun control policy is to appear, after every mass shooting, serious on TV. To address the fact that the the richest one percent in the United States own more wealth than the poorest ninety percent, Democrats rely on campaign contributions from the richest one percent to buy media time from the richest one percent to explain that they might be able to cut five percent of the people in on five percent of the wealth and call it the middle class; the truly destitute can always get a bed in private prisons owned by the one percent. To rebut insane quasi-Christian fundamentalist hate-baiting, they keep their mouths shut and appear reasonable by comparison. There is no anti-war, anti-torture party. There is no anti-destroy-the-world-for-aggression-or-profit party.A PARADE OF CLOUDS, CLOWNS, COWBOYS, CARTOONS, AND COWARDS. Go into the voting booth, put on your blindfold, turn around three times, and pin the tail on the honkey.
S
URGE. You can vote as hard as you want. Impale the ballot. Vote the fuck out of that shit. Be rich, commit fraud, vote multiple times, hire lawyers to arrange multiple illegal campaign contributions, hack into voting machines with Republican-leaning ex-CIA operatives. Turn away low-income minority voters from the polls. Write yourself in. Show up with bags of suspicious absentee ballots you claim were cast by soldiers fighting in the deserts of Central Asia to defend us from people attacking our country in the deserts of Central Asia and challenge the patriotism of anybody who refuses to accept them. Charge admission on a sliding scale, sliding the scale as you see fit. Intimidate. Harass. Close polling places in areas where the demographics do not reflect your interests. Hire a private company to carelessly compile a list of felons, including anybody whose name resembles that of somebody known to be a felon, erring on the side of felon. There are ways to screen voters based on race, class, income, religion. You’re a patriot. Nobody can fault you for caring.
V
oting is orgasming in the body politic. It’s free. You’ll feel spent but cheap afterward. You might find yourself making excuses to yourself in your car. They give you a sticker that stands in for authentic democratic participation. The sticker reads, “I voted,” which means something else, something which cannot be properly expressed in American English but which can be roughly translated as “I was voted against,” or “I was voted against by myself.” Voting is like destroying Washington, D.C. with an atomic bomb, without an atomic bomb. Voting is like free coffee without the coffee, and with a long line. And a sticker. Focus on the sticker. Put it on your handgun and go shoot your boss.
S
ay, my man, can you help me with this ballot? I am trying to find the part where I make an intelligent, compassionate decision and let my opinion be heard resounding through the Halls of Democracy. But all I see are these names. Where’s the part where I articulate input on policy and provide direction for the nation? What did you just say? ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU? I’m not asking, I’m telling. I’m trying to tell my country what it can do. For anybody whose annual income is less than a million dollars.
L
ET’S NOT FORGET THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE. I’d just like to take a moment to recognize the Electoral College. Say you’re buying a car. You go to the car dealer and pick out the car you like. You go to the bank and get the cash you need to buy the car. And then you give the cash to a stranger standing outside the car dealership, someone you’ve never seen before, who won’t tell you his name, who gets into your new car and drives away. Seriously, the Electoral College is a totally essential part of the process. Without the Electoral College, in order to add up all those votes, you’d really have to have something like a computer. Or a lot of fingers and toes. It’s been called “inherently undemocratic.” But I don’t buy that. Me, I’m on the phone with my Electoral College rep every day. I don’t even have to show up to vote—he already knows where I stand. It’s just an extra level of intimacy built into an highly personalized form of effective public oversight of government.
D
on’t joke about bombs in airports. Don’t joke about failed pregnancy or weight gain with spouses. DON’T EVEN JOKE ABOUT NOT VOTING. You don’t have a choice. If you don’t vote and some schmuck gets elected—some aloof, ineffective, vaguely criminal, untrustworthy rhetorician—you think we want to hear your complaints? Come on, bub, you had your chance to get in there and cast that ballot and make a difference, to put your stamp on history, but you fucked it up, didn’t you? You think I respect that? I don’t respect that. It was your move, man, and you turned the whole chessboard over, you walked away. You could have done something, you could have voted. But no. Now look at the mess we’re in.
Let’s get serious. Let’s talk America. For reals. There’s some shit, some fucked-up shit gone wrong up in this bitch. Americans are hungry, scared, violent, and they have guns and want to be on the news and be interviewed on death row about their killing sprees for bullshit true-crime shows brought to you by Reese’s Pieces. It’s a new career path. We have TVs strapped to our faces and eat nothing but trans fat, meth, and sugar. You want Democracy, but it must be founded on a shared vision of a common good, a population that doesn’t hate itself. Does this have something to do with education? We hate education. We love guns. We love hate. To vote is to love hate. Love hate vote.
L
et me repeat that one part: “a shared vision of a common good.” How Martian does that sound right now? Do Republicans go to bed, their Lexuses parked in their heated garages, security lights blinking, and dream of a common good, a country where even inner-city immigrants share in the goodness of a good country with their rich red-state-waste-lots-want-not gated community asses? Are they thinking, If I just get my way about taxing the poor and not the rich to pay for armies made of the children of the poor and not the rich to invade countries that are mostly poor despite having riches, all to secure resources for untaxable corporations, and we outlaw abortion and the environment and labor law, then we can finally all live together—me and you and an ethnic melting pot—in a good country full of happiness and opportunity and savory food and good music? Maybe they do. How the fuck would I know? I think they’re zombies.
V
ote naked. The freaky freedom you feel will be unmatched by the choices presented to you on the ballot but nonetheless you will participate unencumbered. The volunteers will flip desperately through pages of regulations in a transparent effort to block the naked vote, to suppress the naked from being represented by a fully-dressed, expensively three-piece-suited, white/other, male/other, millionaire/billionaire. The man doesn’t want the naked to be heard, to be seen, to swing their glands and genitals through the vaulted archways of representation. Stand erect and be counted. VOTE NAKED. Or drunk and high. Or both or all three. It’s your damn country.
W
HAT KIND OF BALLOT DO THEY GIVE YOU? I’m thinking, if you get the kind where you punch holes with a little hole-punching tool, maybe if you punch hard enough, you can punch a hole through to a different universe with better candidates. Or you could punch out the holes by shooting the ballot with a legal assault rifle. If they say anything when you walk out to hand them the smoking, shredded carcass of your ballot, remind them politely that there is a curtain on the voting booth to ensure your privacy.
I
, Max Winchester, VOTE TO LOSE 80 POUNDS. I vote to lose 40 years. I vote to launder this pair of overalls. I vote to trim this overgrown white beard because I am not goddamn Santa Claus. I vote for the America I was promised on 4 July 1976, with Vietnam lost, Nixon off the lawn, and my kid riding up and down the street at the sunny block party with red-white-and-blue streamers woven through his bicycle spokes. I vote for bourbon in a thermos, which I vote to tell everybody is miso soup. I vote for good books, a very particular method of brewing coffee, and a portable AM radio to talk to when I’m drunk and my wife is asleep. I vote that these tumors dissolve into memories lost in the fog, filling my blood with the sensations of teenage car sex and that first time the cannabis really took me. I vote for a magical country where dreams come true and cynicism is impossible. I vote for hardback books and hardwood floors. I vote for peace a second time. I vote for my poetry students, especially the women. I vote for my favorite glassware, old movies, and laughter that reminds me of the hope I felt. I vote, famished, for the famished, for the vanished familiar comforts of 40 years ago.
H
elp me with this head, it’s come unscrewed. Sorry to cause such a mess here, in this line, in this church, in this hall of government. I just need—can you hold that?—right there—just pinch it closed so no more stuff comes out—thank you—sorry about your sweater—I just—really need to vote—no don’t call an ambulance yet I haven’t had a chance to vote for a good health care system—just—if you could just hold my head for me while I go in there and vote, that’d be—wait, will I need eyes for that? Or a brain?
W
hat’s the big deal, right? It’s not as bad as Thanksgiving and doesn’t happen every year. Okay, it’s not sexy the way we do it here. Nor festive. It’s about as erotic as going to the DMV to renew your driver’s license, only less necessary. But it’s for the president, see? This could be your claim to fame. You could be a player like Enron or Hewlett-Packard or McGraw-Hill or Sheldon Adelson or the Koch Brothers. You can say, “Hey! See that asshole on TV? I voted against that guy! That was me.”
M
ake your mark, your legacy. Voting is exactly like signing the Declaration of Independence, with a flourish that makes John Hancock look timid. FOR MEN ONLY, voting is like fucking a teeny-tiny, dry, butterfly-shaped pinprick in a sheet of cardstock imprinted with the names of (mostly) men who have more money than you ever will and will never notice you or care about you. Be a man. Cede your gram of power to a man in a grey suit who requires Viagra to cheat on his trophy wife with a professional beltway trick.
D
on’t be a loser. Follow polls. Figure out who’s going to win and vote for him. America doesn’t win wars like it used to. Move. Shine a billionaire’s shoes. Offer to sodomize the largest prisoner the day you are admitted. Wait until the Super Bowl is over, cheer for the winner so loud the neighbors can hear, and, that night, go online and buy the winning team’s jersey. Every year. Vote, gloat, suck up. It makes a huge difference which one wins. Get out in front. Have a bumper sticker for each candidate, and, after one wins, put his sticker on your car, his sign on your lawn, his button on your jacket.
S
UCKER. Our founding fathers conceived of a revolutionary system of government investing power in the citizenry, turning the page on centuries of feudalism and barbaric social structures. It’s gentle, elegant, and civilized. After centuries of strife, these learned populists expanded the definition of person to include people. It’s the greatest system of government ever conceived or implemented. By voting, you control the policies of the country you care about. This is the greatest and finest responsibility a person can take on. By voting for one wealthy, compromised imbecile versus another you direct the feeding of the hungry, the distribution of free health care, the cessations of tides of dangerous drugs and weaponry, letting the innocent live in safety and without want or need. One poke with that little poking tool and you restore happiness, security, and freedom to our boiling, troubled land. Don’t oversleep this bitch. It’s like ramming that poking tool through the breastbone of tyranny.
D
id I mention that Election Day is coming up? DRESS UP FOR ELECTION DAY. Be sure to wear a tri-cornered hat, feathers, a powdered wig, a waistcoat, and carry an important scroll. Your quill will be an impressive touch when you finally reach the front of the line where the sadsack from the public library is looking up your name in the reams of computer printouts. And after all that, you get to make history by voting. The best thing is you don’t have to vote for anybody. You can just go into the booth, pull the curtain, look at pornography on your smartphone, spank one off in government-protected privacy, and hand the ballot back, mint, unpoked, unmarked, untouched. They will not question it, they will not reuse it, they will put it in the machine that will not count your nonexistent vote. This shows how serious it all is, and how deeply invested the system is in your participation.
I
FORGOT TO MENTION THAT BILLIONAIRES MIGHT BE SOMEHOW IMPORTANT IN THIS PROCESS. I don’t mean to sound critical of our unnecessarily fortunate and criminally powerful brothers and sisters, many of whom may share with us genetic information that is millions of years old. I really don’t. And if I hate them, well, that’s on me. But no voting manual would be thorough without clarifying this issue. American politics, the population of the United States of America, comprises billionaires and filler. The billionaires are the Fabergé eggs, the rest of us styrofoam packing peanuts. They are the Waterford crystal packed carefully in the box, we are the cardboard and tape. We pack the boxes, drive the trucks, fix the roads, plunge the toilets, open the doors, grease the machines, stitch the shoes, make a midnight call to get the furnace working again, tile the roofs, dispose properly of the surgical waste remaining from triple bypass operations where chunks of filet mignon are extracted from their shriveled billionaire hearts, launder the scrubs, and show up at seven to teach the next generation of styrofoam packing peanuts the math we need to operate the billionaires’ cash registers. And how to vote for one of the billionaires’ candidates.
D
on’t get me wrong. A lot hinges on who is president and who is in Congress. They debate important issues, like how much to continue murderous, unnecessary wars with no stated objectives, how much to lower taxes exclusively for the ultra-rich, and how, exactly, to avoid the subject of human suffering and America’s backsliding into a primitive, barbaric, poisoned wasteland populated by homeless people with untreated diseases but incredible cellphones. And you get to send a message directly to these people by voting. Well, not a message, and not directly, but goddamn, isn’t a chance to walk down to the courthouse or church and stand in line to represent a position on the three issues which served, until recently, to differentiate the two major parties—abortion, gun control, and capital punishment—worth the ten-dollar-a-gallon gas?
S
hit out a vote for America. Fuck it, just close your eyes and vote. It’s not hard. You aren’t required to take a stand on issues concerning savagery or affecting the environmental health or economic hell of the planet. Piss on the ballot and hand it back soggy. Suck down a sheet of LSD and find out what it really means to cast a ballot. Tits showing, lean way down over the folding table where the poor loser from the public library is looking up your name and address in the register; ask him how his chad is hanging. Poke that ballot like you are performing precision acupuncture on the body politic of a nation that has been all but devastated by cluster headaches, let the qi flow. “Dick! Bush!” Yell out these words and see if they consider you less of an American. “Cash. Polk. Gash. Poke. Taft. Ford. Jerk. Pork. Butt. Hole. Cunt. Dole. Ross. Ball. Nazi. Paul. Cuss. Wars. Bill. Gore. Chad. Hang. Rove. Wang. Wall. Main. Jail. Pain. Fist. Fuck. Mitt. Suck. Jizz. Cock. Grid. Lock. ISIS. Iraq. Army. Jack. Navy. Sack. Love. Hate.” VOTE IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD.
D
o you care? Do you really care? Do you want to live in a peaceful civilized nation setting a sterling example for the peoples of the world, so classy and benevolent and organized and disciplined and compassionate and rational that you are like a beautfully advanced creature from outer space? Do you want to live in a prosperous multi-cultural community with amazing landscapes, fantastic art, exotic food, and interesting music? Do you want your community to be the pride of the world? You do? Geez. Me too. Well, anyway, back to what I was trying to say about voting...
H
A. Bet they didn’t expect me to do that! The way I voted, deft and deadly, was a real curve ball. They would have lost sleep if they’d’ve known I was going to throw that left hook. Hey, you already know what a radical I am, but I bet even you were a bit stunned by the way I played that. I mean, nobody could have anticipated those moves. That was some slick, counter-intuitive, deadly, precise, game-changing voting right there. You could feel the whole electroral system shake. Good thing there was a curtain on that booth, or I might have started something, like, I don’t know, a riot, or maybe being carried around the room on the shoulders of cheering people while confetti streamed down. Wow. Sure, you can shake my hand, the hand I voted with, of course. I can tell you, you’ll probably never vote the same again. After what I pulled. Nobody will. Hot damn.
R
emember 2004, when George W. Bush was re-elected? That was wicked. That really proved something. Remember Nixon? That was swell. He got re-elected. But W: remember how he managed to lie and distort despite barely having any mastery of spoken English? Remember that Black Friday when shoppers mauled, maced, trampled, and shot each other in places like Walmart and Target to celebrate the birth of Christ? Sometimes one wonders if America is not in fact not a greater country than, say, for example, the countries to whom we owe billions of dollars. Like China. Remember Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, Dan Quayle, the Unabomber? Remember Vietnam? Try to put all of that out of your mind when you vote. Just tell yourself that in every presidential election a new America is birthed. Bloody and screaming, helpless, prone to infection and deformity, unable even to form words for a year or more, and then, within four years, it grows into an infantile, narcissistic tyrant. It’s like that.
V
oting is like firing a gun. Into a pillow of air. A toy gun. A silent toy gun. A very tiny, pink, toy gun, with no trigger. And a silencer. Unloaded. It’s like that. An imaginary bullet aimed straight into or near to the heart of nothing or nowhere for no reason that nobody sees nor hears that makes no difference to anybody and doesn’t matter and none of it need ever have existed. Think of a gun made of paper. Then immerse it in water for five minutes. This is the gun you wield on the revolutionary streets as you storm the voting centers to change America. The gun might also be made of whipped cream, Jello, clouds, good intentions, fairy dust, or the way dreams evaporate so quickly upon wakening. BANG.
I
remember the first time I voted. Flowers were in bloom. The sky opened up and Democracy fell out. I’m just kidding, I don’t ever remember voting. I block it out. It’s a terrible experience. I remember when Obama won. There were students partying in the street—you could hear them two miles away. I remember when Bush won. There was a landlord at the bar watching the election on TV. It makes a difference. Do you believe in “the lesser of two evils?” Less evil: the promise of our system, the best lesser evil in the world. Less evil than Saddam Hussein. Less evil than Osama bin Laden. Less evil than pure Evil, which makes America impure evil. Like evil that contains extracts from corn products that were cheaper and had a longer shelf life than pure, natural evil. America.
V
oting is like snorting coke and being fucked by wild rhinos. No. Voting is more like skydiving with a parachute but with no sky. Voting is like quitting your hated job and experiencing the total liberating bliss of unemployment for one drunken night and then needing to find a job really bad and hating yourself all over again in a new way. Voting is like killing yourself only without a self. It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced, including voting. Because I’m not actually talking about voting. Or America. Or Democracy. I’m talking about the idea of it all. I’m talking about participation. If you’ve ever had sex without participating, that’s what voting is like. Make noises to make America think you’re enjoying it. Afterward, wear the sticker of shame.
W
e’re going to change all that, by the way. If nobody voted, nobody at all, and nobody hacked into electronic ballot machines to create fake votes, and nobody cheated, and there were no fraudulent election returns or real ones either, not a single vote at all, would they—and, actually, who is “they”?—let the Supreme Court appoint another Republican, or do the right thing, and hold the election all over again to give just one person, one lonely, sad, nerdy, pedantic sap, the chance to step forward and walk into the glorious Hall of Democracy to pick... Ralph Nader! Ralph Nader! RALPH NADER!
I
say step out this year, and vote for the pro-war party. Vote pro-poverty, pro-fucked-up-heath-care-system, pro-environmental-devastation, pro-asshole, pro-television-bullshit, pro-cruel-stupidity. Just try to view the world though the lenses of a narcissistic billionaire and cast your vote accordingly, by voting for one of the two major parties in the two-party system. Vote anti-disarmament, anti-whale, anti-child, anti-mother, anti-education, anti-innovation, anti-peace, anti-sanity, anti-intellectual. Cast your vote. Just say: Fuck you, world. I dare you—I beg you—to stop me. I am going to gamble your ass and mine and take a chance on these options. Vote for Satan. Or stay home, see if I care, we already won. Ha!
R
emember what I just said about voting? I WAS JUST KIDDING. Who says America has to be great, that voting has to be pleasant, that you have to be emotionally involved. This is life. You wake up, get out of bed, get old, die. And along the way many unfortunate things happen, spattered with occasional inexplicably wonderful moments mixed with things that were supposed to be wonderful but were actually kind of strained or bland and it is not polite to point out the difference. Did somebody give you permission to tell your family at Christmas time that you find them annoying and unlovable? No. Quit bitching. At least you can get penicillin in this country, or a decent burger. What did you want, Utopia? Norway? Acknowledge Christmas. Respect your parents. Nod to your boss. Vote. Suck it.
I
n the movie WRECKED, actor Adrian Brody crawls out of a crashed car at the bottom of a ravine with a broken leg and spends days crawling through the mud grunting in pain. He is desperate to find help, but we the viewers are even more desperate for something to happen in the movie. Voting is like that. The film has no dialog. Voting is like that. There is a bag full of thousands of dollars in the trunk of the car, but for some reason he doesn’t take it. There is a gun, but he doesn’t really use it. He finds a single match and cellphone in the mud, but they don’t really come in handy. Voting is like that. Wrecked is the most excruciatingly painfully shitty and not-even-in-a-funny-way tedious movie I have ever seen. I had to stop watching it twice. But I finished. Just so that I could see, in the last thirty seconds, a meaningless event that resolved nothing. And this year I am going to vote for a president.
In Wrecked, Adrian Brody’s character executes the love of his life. He shoots her in the head at point-blank range. For no reason. He has amnesia, he doesn’t remember her, he just shoots her. Because her recurring apparition is just bugging him. He shoots his one true love, who is not very nice to him, for no reason. And it turns out she’s a ghost anyway. Or a hallucination, we aren’t sure. So he didn’t really kill her. It was an empty, meaningless, nihilistic gesture. VOTING FOR JOHN KERRY WAS JUST LIKE THAT.
I
have a headache I did not vote for. Who did? Who wrote the legislation passed by whom that kept the sun zipped behind clouds all week? Was my sore throat on the ballot? Have there been secret elections? Have there been riders we didn’t know about, encoded in language a lawyer would have had to explain to us? What about my pension? My toothache? Did the public back a vote to make my family disappointed in me? I voted for the More Books and Records Party over the Nest Egg Party consistently for years and I was certain they had my best interests at heart. I am sleepy. Whose vote was that? And another thing I can’t find on this ballot: am I allowed to choose a new country?
I
can’t afford to go to the literary conference. My muse has a gun to my head. She won’t let me research what kind of gun it is. She grins and says, “Just write ‘gun,’ bitch.” I do what she says. She won’t let me out of this town, out of this job. “Trust fund,” I say, “give me an inheritance like the writers I know in Boston and Brooklyn. Give me a professorship in Europe where I work two days a week and get free child care and health care. Nobody voted for these poets. Claude Reagan was awarded tenure by a secret committee. John Rock could write anything and it would be in the newspapers.” “Get back to work,” she hisses. I want her to cock the gun or take the safety off because I saw it in a TV show, but she won’t give me the satisfaction. Later I walk out to my car with the gun poem, which is called “The Trust Fund in American Literature,” but I know it’s compromised (written not from the heart but from the spleen) and another bunch of muses jump me and beat the shit out of me. I catch glimpses of golden knuckles and a tattoo reading “Do not go gentle” before one of them brings a bottle of Moet Chandon down on my head. I sit in my car now, bleeding, determined to scribble this, thinking: America is a word, and the president is just the font. FUCK FONTS. I need a second reason to write poetry.
m
uses are fuses. Like poetry, voting should be the creative spark that lights the bomb. The explosion brings down the ancient masonry, wheezes away the dust, and the clouds part revealing the vision of the new. This idea burns its way into your skull, kisses the brain powder. Then you blow. Then you cast a vote for the future, for the new way things will be, for an American composition that could never have existed without you and your vote. This is when the condemned building crashes down. Explosive charges are planted carefully in the incumbent’s skeleton, legs, knees, and spine, and a series of precisely timed controlled demolitions brings him crashing down at nearly free-fall speed into his own footprints. Without the muses clustered in that sky, in that thunderhead, up in a corner of your study ceiling, beyond the glow the lamp casts, it could never have happened. Vote your poem, rewrite the future, scribble your participatory calligraphy upon the palimpsest of this democratic experiment. Turn off the cable news. Consult your muses. Adjust your powdered wig in the mirror, light your lamp, dip your quill, unroll your parchment, and vote for something better.
I
had this other dream where oil is discovered underneath the White House. A geyser of light, sweet, crude oil volcanoes into the air from an orifice in the rose gardens, painting the mansion in oozing sheets of black, drenching tourists and suited staff and interns coming and going in a shuffling run holding the Washington Post over their heads to shield their tailored attire from this godawful viscous mess, this nightmare, this wet, black nightmare. I woke up with votes growing all over my body—a rash of participation. Pustulant resolutions for candidates and measures, itching like hell, red and green spots bursting with passionate commitment. I can no longer be contained by my own skin or by unimaginative political platforms. Even the soothing balm of bland rhetoric and perpetually inoffensive words such as “community” fail to ameliorate the pain, the excruciating, visceral feeling that my organs are erupting out of my flesh to fill the empty shell called “America.”
Every morning mom forced a comb through my hair and force-fed me a glass of orange juice. Every Sunday I was required to eat an egg. At school I learned multiplication tables. To write right there they’re their to too two hear here, a page on Rhode Island, another on Thailand. And to hide beneath my desk from hydrogen bombs during air raid drills, should Soviet missiles fill the Seattle skies. I fell for the Cold War. I thought that shit was real. I played doctor with the girl across the street in her dad’s bomb shelter, inventing medical procedures to ease swelling caused by radiation poisoning in sick, erotic, pre-adolescent, post-apocalyptic fantasies. That Cold War was no fucking joke. They had us thinking, wow, once this is over and we have Russia on our side, we’ll have no war again. No Koreas, Vietnams, Nicaraguas. Nothing but picnics, safe skies, and the moral custodianship of the international community. It now occurs to me, every time I hear the word “literally” misused as an intensifier (“this country is literally going to hell in a handbasket!”), that the Cold War, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror are not wars. Drugs are not a nation with soldiers. War is terror, and causes poverty. When “literally” becomes meaningless, “war” becomes unbound from meaning: figurative, but literally murderous.
W
hen the Berlin Wall fell I would have danced in the street if I could dance. War had ended! We could get on with the long-promised business of world peace! Solving hunger! Replacing sixties rock with better music! But when the wall fell, with it fell the rules of engagement, the Geneva Convention, the very definition of “war.” In 1989, it became patriotic and fine television to invade a tiny, helpless former ally for harboring a single drug dealer, to protect a preferred dictatorship from one that had fallen from favor, to overthrow a government whose country allegedly harbored an alleged terrorist, to destroy a country with bombs for suspicion of having bombs, to kill civilians and call it “liberating.” Remember how Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, ties to Al-Qaeda, purchased aluminum tubes and yellowcake uranium for nuclear weapons?—all premises that would be discredited and dropped while the war raged on, dragged on and opened more doors to more wars. Peace was then never a political agenda, now no longer even a political word. “Peace” no longer means the absence of war, it means acceptance, as in, “our nation engages in routine war crimes, torture, extrajudicial internment, and extraordinary renditions, and, thanks to Zoloft, I’m at peace with that.” I’d like to vote, please.
I
’d like to vote to immediately cease developing new weapons of mass destruction, and to stick with all the weapons of mass destruction we already have. I told somebody this idea and they said it was preposterous. We needed to keep up with our enemies. What enemies? I vote for changing our country’s name to “Canada.”
V
ote like you’re planting a seed. A tiny seed. An innocous granule the size of a drop of water. A little parcel with enough genetic information to stretch across a continent. It might take root and grow into a wild, tangled, gorgeous, flowering, leafy, shade-giving tree loaded with sumptuous fruit. It might proliferate into a forest of political compassion, dropping cones and needles, providing habitats and refuge for all manner of life. In that seed is a future ecosystem. Maybe it will grow. Maybe it won’t.
U
NZIP YOUR HEART. Withdraw this sticky, quivering desire, squirming, pinched between two fingers. Don’t let it get away. The blood is soaking your shirt and pants, filling your shoes, as the soaring beat of your emotion floods you. Hold that wriggling specimen to the light, admire the veins of its hopes, the fibrous structure of its wishes. It flicks stinging fluid in your eye. A burning weakness ascends you. Uncaged from your ribs, the desire pulses and grows, struggles to escape you. You wanted this country. Everything is going hot and red. Are you strong enough to live with open desire?
I
THINK I’VE FIGURED OUT THE PROBLEM. I go to the polls to vote against the Republican candidate by voting for the Democrat. And they would let me write in the name of a candidate not on the ballot, right? But I went to the polls to vote against, not for. So why won’t they let me write in a candidate to vote against? I vote against war. I vote against poverty. I vote against bad speechwriting. I vote against ghastly misrepresentations of Islam or Christianity. I vote against deprivation and its threats. I vote against rape. I vote against the corporate plundering of the environment, international labor, and public funds. These are the things I have come to city hall to accomplish. A simple change to the ballot is all that is required to allow me full participation. Eureka. Wait.
Y
ou know what? I’m just going to be president. Will I do a good job? I doubt it. I can barely manage a classroom. I’ve come dangerously close to jumping onto the desks of department heads and kicking them in the face. I probably won’t do too well with supreme court justices, five star generals, or speakers of the house. And there’s the matter of how laws get passed and such. How the system works when the system works. I have to go back and listen to my kid’s Schoolhouse Rock CD again. I have no political connections, no capital, no experience, but, to my credit, I have no political connections, no capital, no experience. I can’t wait any longer for a party. If you want the job done right, right? SO I’VE CANCELED THE ELECTION. See you on TV.
I
liked the guy. I did. CALL ME ELITIST, but I think a president should be operating above an eighth-grade reading level. Young, gifted, and all. Nice suit. Looks damn good, and his speeches sound like he’s a diplomat speaking with measured passion and carefully sculpted sentences to citizens he cares about, is frightened of, or at least feels a sense of responsibility toward. He seldom if ever used the word “terror.” It was easy to turn away from the podium and microphones, to stop reading newspapers and writing poetry, and just doze off in the back seat with this guy at the wheel. Every now and then you woke up, peered out at the passing junkyards and desecrated, uninhabited luxury suburbs with two-year-old vacant mcmansions already crumbling, and mumbled “This isn’t the way home,” but it would never be your turn to drive, regardless. And you were so tired. You’d been awake, knuckles white, for eight or more years. A four-year nap might do you some good. I liked the guy. The first time, he was the only person I ever voted for instead of voting against for. And America was none the better for my stab at optimism. But the worst of it is, I have a feeling, no matter how bad it turns out, I am going to look back at this guy, and I am going to miss him, really miss him, no matter how disappointed in him I might be.
O
R… Do what makes a difference. Be nice to people all day. Do not fire tens of thousands of workers or cruise missiles. Do not revoke pensions, drop cluster bombs, conduct extraordinary renditions, waterboard, or privatize anything. Smile at strangers. Forget your problems. Have compassion. Help them avoid foreclosure. Love children unconditionally. Adore adults the same way. Grow food. Collect every punched chad from your ballot and compost them to grow tomatoes or recycle them by using them to make crafts such as a chad bracelet or toe ring for a child you love. Elect yourself president of yourself and enact policies you have been longing for. I did.
I
voted for this book. There was no booth, no ballot, no elderly woman to flip through a register of authors’ names to compare them against my ID. I stood alone in an empty church. I said, “I want the book I want.” There were over 26 candidates, and I voted 40,000 times. It was exhausting, demanding, but thorough. It wasn’t like I went to write my book and instead got to vote for either a blue John Irving or a red John Updike, and then had this vote given to a secret committee to tabulate and deliver to an authorial college from whom the final decision would come, resulting in a copy of Rabbit Redux being delivered to a secure, inaccessible, heavily guarded location two months later, when what I wanted to elect was How to Vote by Max Winchester. I got the book I wanted. But what if voting were like writing your country, actually thorough and difficult, full of choices, demanding, and requiring a comprehensive knowledge of the workings of government, the issues of the day, and the consequences facing us as a nation? What if voting demanded literacy, imagination, and work? And brilliance. LIKE THIS FUCKING BOOK.
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