Why Intellectual Elite Have Voting Clout

So now everyone hates the electoral college system. Well, not me. The electoral college was a product of our founding fathers, who, being giants of history, are beyond reproach, even though they wore stockings and, as hiftorical manufcriptf suggeft, lisped a little.

The electoral college arose as a compromise over the relative power of the states. But there was also a consensus that the common rabble could not be trusted with so grave a decision without the help of electors--citizens good and true and wise and sober and male and white and rich and strutting and preening, with names like “Thos. W. Preppington of Preppingtonshire.” Voila, the electoral college.

I firmly believe in the superiority of the intellectual elite; thus, I support the electoral college system, despite whatever minor problems it has created, such as the recent near dissolution of the republic. To prove my case, I decided to interview a number of the winning 2000 electors--Republicans from Virginia and Democrats from Maryland--and ask them questions tough enough to stump the rest of us rabble.

I was disappointed to find that they no longer have names like Thos. W. Preppington. They have names like Luther E. “Ikey” Miller. Luther, 68, is a retired court clerk from Rileyville, Va., and is an elector for George W. Bush. He agreed to take my questions. This was the first:

“Is the human brain essentially a computer wrought in flesh, or are there properties of consciousness and thought that transcend the physical world?”

Silence. Finally:

“Lawdamercy, what the [heck] you talking about? You tryin’ to bumfuzzle me. I’m not going to answer that directly. I’m going to tell you this. I make up my own mind, regardless of what anybody tells me, and I will until the casket drops on top of me. Does that answer your question?”

Yessir, I said.

I asked Mary Murphy, 58, a retired phone company worker who is a Democratic elector from Brandywine, Md., to explain the scientific principle behind the operation of the refrigerator.

“You plug it into the socket. Then it turns on.”

And then what?

“And then it makes things cold!”

I asked, “If the universe is expanding, as scientists agree, what is it expanding into? What’s beyond the universe?”

“It wouldn’t be important stuff,” Mary decided. “Probably something like clouds.”

Clouds?

“Or sand.”

In all, I talked to 14 of the two states’ 23 electors and found them to be pleasant, earnest people, well qualified to be electors by virtue of loyalty to their party. You could no sooner bribe one of these people to vote for the opposition candidate than you could bribe a dog to moo.

I asked everyone whether there is “good” and “evil,” or whether these are merely a wan human effort to establish a moral compass in the maelstrom of an inhospitable and amoral universe. Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., the president of the Maryland Senate and a Democratic elector, answered instantly: “There is good and evil. Al Gore and George Bush.”

All the electors shared one trait, which is, I think, valuable for electors to have. Whatever position they took, they took forcefully and without compromise, however unknowable the topic might seem to us ordinary rabble.

For example, I asked Mary Love, a Democratic elector from Glen Burnie, Md., if God was powerful enough to create a rock too heavy for Him to lift.

Absolutely, she said.

B-but . . . .

“You can be powerful without being able to lift a heavy rock,” she said, “like Winston Churchill.”

Good point. With Churchillian might, I demanded that Parker J. Bena, a Republican elector from Virginia Beach, Va., take a stance on whether there is sentient life elsewhere in the universe.

“There is,” he said.

Why haven’t they contacted us?

“I’m not saying they haven’t. There are ancient Inca carvings of what are believed to be spaceships, and there are the pyramids.”

The pyramids? Evidence of aliens?

“Could be.”

Nah. If you ask me, an ancient, enormous, unwieldy structure of puzzling design--a quaint but useless monument to a bygone era--well, it probably wasn’t made by aliens. Humans make things like that all by themselves.

All the electors shared one trait, which is, I think, valuable for electors to have. Whatever position they took, they took forcefully and without compromise, however unknowable the topic might seem to us ordinary rabble.