Lend Me Your Ears

As Frank Lloyd Wright once said, "Democracy is a wonderful thing. We ought to try it sometime." The Greeks had a great idea, and America's founding fathers were inspired enough to attempt to apply it to the 13 unruly original colonies, but there was no way they could envisage the day when it would be unworkable. Actually, Thomas Jefferson was wise enough to suggest that for it to succeed, a revolution would be required every twenty-five years or so. Which would be an interesting concept as long as there wasn't any loss of life or destruction of property. Well, some destruction of property might not be so bad if it involved WalMart outlets, McDonald's franchises, and billboards. It's not so much that bad men have their grubby hands on a good system. It's the system that's flawed. Let's face it, democracy is nifty as long as you're not dealing with more than a handful of people, say a maximum of five. And even then nobody has figured out a way to factor individuals into the process. When I was very small, before my younger brother was born, my father wrote a poem that summed it up:

Boz wanted to go to the zoo,

Johnny wanted to go there too,

Daddy said 'twas the thing to do,

But mommy said no.

That is how the voting went

In our domestic parliament,

Three were for and one against,

So we didn't go.