“If the elderly voters in Palm Beach can play bingo, what can be so hard about marking a ballot with two choices?” one of them asked us. “Dumb seems fashionable in America,” said another. “True?”
“How can this be?” is what they are really asking. Illiterate African tribesmen, some of them existing as if in another epoch, vote with colored beads, one color for this candidate, one for that, and when the voting is over, the beads are counted. A leader is elected.
Each time I try to explain the Electoral College I find myself making less and less sense–to myself. Our system’s capacity for chaos was always there, where the electors are not obliged by law (in all 50 states) to give a hoot about what the population decides. It was true when the college was formed, and it is true now.
“The potential-for-chaos bit, that sounds like Africa, too,” one woman in Cape Town told me.
It was hard to argue with her.
We can’t be trusted with leadership, African columnists are writing, if we can’t be trusted to choose our own leader. By extension, everyone on earth should vote for the next man to occupy the White House. This has also been put forward in print.
For their part, the Zimbabweans are feeling smug. Their recent presidential election–a mess in which the president’s supporters shot and murdered the opposition and beat up their candidate–looked orderly by comparison to ours, or so their papers are saying. Why did the U.S. government send election observers there, they want to know, when native Zimbabwean observers are more obviously needed in Florida? Maybe there is a point.
A good time, compliments of us, is being had by all on this continent. It is serving as a justification, too. African elections are sometimes decided less on the outcome of the ballot than the trajectory of the bullet. In too many African nations voters are given a choice of the dictator in power or the door. But at least they get the job decisively done–again, so their papers are saying.
The American election has given everyone we meet a welcome chance to aim pins in the direction of America’s over-inflated balloon of pomposity. People here are not being nasty or insulting; they are just a little sick of America’s endless preaching to the world. And they are tired of our domination of culture and business and politics. When we see them smile, we smile, too. Thanks to our election, our Silly Season is being observed globally.
