What if a general election were a horse race? No, too complicated. Fences. Horses and jockeys. Difficult to understand. I’ll try again. What if a general election were a 100-metre race? Mmm, no, too tricky. Scope for misunderstandings. Lanes cause problems. No, that won’t do. That won’t do at all. Starting pistols? Photo finishes? All far too hard to understand. Give me a minute.
OK, let’s say a general election is just like a cricket match. And the ball is your vote, and the stumps are the winning margin, and you bowl your vote at the winning margin, and . . . no. No, no, no. This isn’t helping at all.
I’ll try again. Nice and simple. Because you’re stupid. Because you’re too thick to get the idea of voting, and you need it turned into something that you can understand, because you hate the idea of politics and everything that goes with it; and besides, you don’t have the time to think about facts, or problems, or complexity, or nuance – you’re just a tot in a crib, waiting for Daddy to tell you a story. You don’t want anything other than a happy ending.
Let’s face it, you’re thick. You’re dumb. You’re barely more than a dribbling infant slamming its tiny hands into a bowl of goo because you like the way it splatters. That’s the level we’re trying to pitch this at. Because that’s all you’re capable of getting. Voting is something that you’re afraid of because you’re a dummy, and unless we talk to you about it bright colours AND CAPITAL LETTERS and smiley faces, you’re not going to get your oh-so-pretty little heads around it, are you?
OK. So. Right. Imagine you’re at a football match, right, and the team you wanted to win didn’t win because someone else wanted the other team to win, even though they actually wanted your team to win. Yes . . .? No. No, we really aren’t making any headway.
OK, let’s see if we can try and nudge you in the right direction another way. What if someone you liked thought about voting in a particular way; what would you think then? Look, here’s someone famous, them off from off of the television. What do you think now? They look pretty bright, don’t they, and they got famous for writing, or being funny, or running around and jumping over hurdles, or whatever it is; and look, they think this way. Or, if that won’t convince you, look at these bad people, people you don’t like. They’re bad people, and they think this way. Now what do you think?
Forget about all those thoughts about things being slightly more complicated than they might at first appear. Try to forget, if you can. It’s a miracle you don’t burn yourself on the toaster every morning, really, but there it is; you’ve made it through life this far without too many problems, and so you get given a vote, to do with as you wish. It’s just that, well, you don’t want to do all that boring stuff about democracy, and representation, or the comparable benefits of different voting systems, do you? You don’t want to think about all that. You’ve got better things to do.
So let’s just talk about things in a simplistic, infantile way that you can comprehend, even in your tiny squashy noggin, because you’re frankly not bright enough to want to know about anything that’s slightly more difficult to grasp than a slap in the face with a gardening glove. Just you leave it to us to tell you how to do it. And there you are! Democracy will be improved unimaginably, just by you putting your vote here. Or there. Wherever we’ve told you to put it. Because it’s the right thing for YOU.
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