{"id":11206,"date":"2008-06-03T11:06:40","date_gmt":"2008-06-03T15:06:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/06\/03\/11206.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:41","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:41","slug":"hold-your-nose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/06\/03\/hold-your-nose\/","title":{"rendered":"Hold Your Nose"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger was listening, yesterday, to a bit on NPR’s Day to Day<\/I> about Voters Who Plan to Hold Their Noses<\/a>. I know that many Gentle Readers are frustrated by electoral politics, generally, and I know that not everybody here is a supporter of my Party, or of our nominee presumptive, and I haven’t used this Tohu Bohu to argue for that support. Perhaps I should. It’s not like I have a lot of platforms for such argument. Still, as much as I do support Sen. Obama’s candidacy, and as much as I do support the Democratic Party, I spend much more of my time supporting something much more vague and much less interesting: representative democracy, our constitutional system, our inheritance from James Madison, and the ideals of compromise and persuasion that I think go along with them.
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So. Just in case nobody has said this recently, Gentle Reader, because I didn’t hear anybody say it on NPR, here’s the thing to remember: You are supposed to hold your nose and vote<\/I>. Your candidate stinks. If you can’t smell the stink coming off your candidate, that’s because you haven’t been paying attention, and you are supposed to pay attention. We aren’t governed by angels. We are governed by ourselves, that is, by people, and people are different, one to another, which is what makes the world interesting and fun, and also means that you are different from your candidate, from all the available candidates, from the ideal candidate. Hell, even if you are<\/I> the candidates, you should have to hold your nose to vote for yourself. You know better then anybody how bad you stink. You know the things you have done that disqualify you, the poor judgments you have made, the people you have trusted that didn’t deserve trust, the positions you held that were poorly thought out, or held for political advantage. So don’t waste your time and energy looking for a perfect candidate. Actually, it’s more than a waste. It’s an active disparagement of Madisonian representative democracy, and that search works to the detriment of actual governance, and thus to the actual lives of actual people.
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Get your hands dirty. Not only do flowers grow in shit, but your search for clean chemical fertilizer is ruining the soil. Shit is better. It stinks, but it works.
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I’ve never voted for a perfect candidate. The best I’ve ever had, Sen. Kennedy, was a drunk and a womanizer, whose personal irresponsibility made him a national laughingstock and undoubtedly made his (and his staff’s) work negotiating important legislation much harder. He is also one of our history’s greats, and I was moved almost to tears by the opportunity to vote for him, but I also held my nose. I held my nose when I voted for John Kerry for the Senate, and I held my nose when I voted for him for the Presidency. I held my nose when I voted for the local school board, where perfectly competent people have failed to see their way out of the financial pinch coming from the combination of retirees and young families. I held my nose when I voted for Barbara Boxer, and I held my nose when I voted for some Socialist instead of voting for Diane Feinstein (who was going to win anyway, and who I felt needed some reminding that the state was still on her left, and not just when she looked north). I held my nose when I voted for Bill Clinton, and I held my nose again when I voted for him again, and I would have held my nose a third time, had we not passed a bizarre and anti-democratic constitutional amendment that prevents us from voting while holding our noses.
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Look, we stink. We all stink. We are all terrific, and we all stink. Every one of us is a compromise, and we all get votes, and every one of us votes for a compromise, and it all stinks. Hold your nose. But do it anyway, because the alternative, holding out for the guy who doesn’t stink, well, you may as well wait for Elijah to give the nominating speech and the host of angels to second the motion. And while you are waiting, people are dying.
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And do you know what? They stink, too.
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There is work to be done. Actual work, by actual legislators, actual executives and their staffs, actual people who actually stink. You can hold your nose and help, if you want to. And if you don’t want to, fine, but you still need to hold your nose. Anyone who thinks that they don’t need to hold their nose while voting for Bob Barr or Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney or Chuck Baldwin Brian Moore or John McCain or Barack Obama, well, they stink, that’s what.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger defends the basic principle of representative democracy: holding your nose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18385,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11206\/revisions\/18385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}