So You Think You Can Be President

This is a proposal of the most grave and honest intent.

Here it is. We have two years to get ready for this. I propose that we replace our current system of electing the President of the United States. Instead of the campaign/election process, the President should be chosen based on the call-in votes of Americans during a reality competition television show called So You Think You Can Be President. I submit that we will get better, more reliable results than we get with the current system. Voters will know their candidates much more deeply and they will be more confident and informed in their ultimate voting decisions. But the show must be carefully planned to yield the most reliable results.

First, there will be no party affiliations. Let's get that done from the start, because that is an archaic idea and parties cause more troubles than they abate. Parties are a smokescreen for cowardice and laziness of thought.

Second, all candidates must be over the age of forty and they must carry a master's degree in an academic discipline. (This helps to insure their potential as learners and thinkers.) Career politicians are welcomed to apply, but so are, say, English teachers, laywers, doctors, business people and librarians, etc.

Stage one of the competition:

People from each state who want to be President will upload a five-minute video speech to their state's designated site. They will explain in this speech why they want to and think they can be President. The people in the state will vote and the top vote-getter from each state will be sent to the So You Think You Can Be President White House -- an exact replica of the White House constructed on an undisclosed site. All 50 of the Internet picks will live there until the first big elimination: the American history test.

Stage two:

The American history test will be written by a panel of history professors chosen from American universities. The lowest twenty of the contestants will be sent home after the first episode of the show. The top 30 will remain and they will begin competing.

Our panel of American history professors will be replaced, at this point, by a panel of political science professors. These professors will administer a test, each week, on the Constitution. Any contestant who scores below an 85% on the test for the week will receive a penalty of a 10% decrease in his or her popular call-in votes for the week. Any competitors who receive below a 70%, at any time, will be immediately eliminated from the competition, regardless of their popularity. The test will be as objectively oriented as possible. Interpretation will be left for the ensuing competitions.

The show will be produced, of course, by the producers of American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance. On the show, there will be a panel of commentators who will have nothing to do with the voting process -- they just comment. This panel will consist of John Stewart, Dennis Miller, Glenn Beck, Rachel Maddow and Ben Stein. These judges will comment on the contestants' performance in much the same way as the American Idol judges comment when the votes are in the hands of the public. Since no one will be part of a political party, these judges will not be swayed by preconceptions and their backgrounds should be from diverse enough places that there is a give-and-take in their evaluative process, no matter how asinine or agenda-driven some of them might have been in the past. (It will be interesting to see where they stand on things when there no pre-labeling of contestants. If George Carlin were still with us, he would have been invited to be on the panel as the unwavering voice of reason, though he would undoubtedly have turned the offer down.)

Stage three: The weekly show will consist of challenges in which the contestants have to prove themselves in the areas of 1) ethics, 2) logic, 3) current issues and 4) presidential scenarios. The challenges will be devised by professors in areas related to each of these topics. Representatives of the religions of our country will also be part of the "ethics" element. The professors, clergy and producers will create and present the contestants with challenges and, each week, the public will vote for the winners after the breakdown and commentary of the judges; the three least-voted-for contestants will be eliminated each Friday. (The producers can iron out the process, but you get the point.)

During the process, contestants will be required to keep daily blogs regarding the show's progress. Everyone in the country (and the world) will have access to these blogs twenty-four hours a day.

The winner of the show will be our next President.

The prize: being President. There is no salary. For four years, the President and his or her family will be supplied with food, clothing and a pretty nice place to live in Washington, D.C. After that, he or she is free to compete on the show again, but after the second term, that person is on his or her own. No lifelong salary, no special benefits. The former President is free to work in any area he or she wants, but is no longer to be called "President." The ultimate reward will be to have served the American public, with no personal gain.

After this process we will have a President who is well known by the people before he or she takes office and who was chosen based on a display of intelligence, knowledge, logic, ethics and performance under pressure in simulated presidential scenarios. This person will have been chosen based on his or her ideas and not based on people's prejudice against or for subjective party stereotypes. The President will have been tested by experts in their fields and grilled, publicly, by some insightful comic and political minds. And, perhaps most importantly, the American public will have participated in the electoral process with the same energy they give to dance shows and singing shows, which, by my estimation, is about three-times the attention and thought they give to elections, including those who vote.

All advertising proceeds from the show will go to the country's poor. And me.

WHADDAYOU THINK? Revisions? Other ideas?

When the Crowd Closes In

I sing the praise of the long-distance runner who takes to the road in the damp morning darkness and sinks into the rhythm of her feet hitting the pavement and who floats through the wondrous maze of her thoughts in a runner's high, exploring who she is and how strong she can become. So long as she is preparing for a race she doesn't care about winning.

I sing the praise of the boy sitting in his silent room at night on a Saturday, painting tiny pewter figures and watching old Sherlock Holmes films as the fog curls around his house. So long as he is going to meet his friends for a role-playing adventure during the week and put those painted pieces to use.

I sing the praise of the teenaged girl staying home from the mall on a weekend afternoon, no make up, hair in a ponytail, pencil hissing over the pages and filling the book in her lap with sketches. So long as she will share her vision with the world on a day to come.

I sing the praise of the songwriter at the piano, surrounded by papers and working out the fine elements of a chord progression by himself, hours on end, whisper-singing, lightly playing late at night so as not to awaken his wife. So long as he has the guts to sing his songs out loud to the crowd -- when the time comes.

I sing the praise of the prayerful old woman who has been prayerful since her days of staggering beauty and robust health, praying alone in her outdated kitchen over a steaming cup of coffee. So long as she goes to worship to worship, and not to be lauded for the way she covers her face while she prays or for how loudly she sings.

I praise the thinkers, the believers and the makers and those who treasure silence and solitude and improvement. So long as they stay in the mix, on their own terms. So long as they realize that "community" can be nonsense, but doesn't have to be. So long as they think of themselves first and the world second, but with deep concern. As it must be.

I praise all of the people I hope I can be when the time comes; when the crowd closes in.

A Case for Paranoid Parenting

My dad once said, "If everyone in the world were me, a three-year-old girl could wander out of her house onto a city street at three a.m. and she would be picked up and safely delivered home." He's right. It's true. Same thing if everyone were me. Or you, right? So where the hell are these other people coming from? -- the ones who would hurt a little girl? Say it out loud: There are people out there who would actually hurt a little girl. Hard to digest, isn't it? Think that over for a second while looking at this picture:

(source)

Okay, ready?

If it is not us, doing this horrible stuff, who is it? Out of a hundred people, how many of them would harm this little wayward angel? Out of a crowd of thousands? Are there people who are that evil in the picture above? Are they in your building or school or next to you in the cubicle cluster at work?

I'm assuming that nobody reading this would ever hurt our hypothetical lost waif. If I am right about all this, what are we all so worried about? Why wouldn't we let our daughters roam city streets at night?

I'm also assuming a minute portion of the people in the entire world would commit atrocities against a child. That has to be true, right? Well, if it is, maybe we are being held hostage by our imaginations.

But, then, there are the news stories of kids being dragged away; of unspeakable pedophilic rapes; of molestation; of mutilations; of predators of all kinds targeting children; of lonely, deluded people who would steal your baby for their own.

More about my dad: he will not go in the ocean. He saw Jaws and that was that. When my uncle said to him, "Do you know what the odds are of a shark attack? Like, 234 million to one," my dad thought for a minute and responded: "I don't like the odds." Further wisdom from a wise man with dry feet and, to this day, both of them.

Parents and parents of the future: watch your kids and watch everything around them. Don't make you kids stay out of the water, but keep a relentless eye on the horizon for fins. I mean this literally and metaphorically. For heaven's sake, don't let them know you're looking, but keep an eye out, quietly, and with a smile on your face. Don't enjoy yourself at crowded amusement parks: watch. (Yes, I am literally asking parents to sacrifice fun in an amusement park -- at least until they get safely clicked into the rollercoasters.) Be paranoid. Go home exhausted from worry, but with as many kids in the back seat as you showed up with. But don't show the kids your exhaustion. Be paranoid without making them paranoid. Bear the burden while showing no sign of it. You can do it, because your love is (or will be) that big. Soon enough, they will be able to take care of themselves and you can relax. Not now, though. Not while they're little.

And prepare them. Do they know the tricks the sickos of the world might use against them? Do they know how to say "no" to a grown-up? Do know that no one has a right to touch them in certain ways?

I once said to my son, when he was four, "What would you do if someone pulled up in a car and said 'Your mom and dad sent me to get you'?" He said, with a chubby little smile: "Go with them!" What would your kid say?

Prepare them by making them ready, not by making them scared. I know, I know, but you have to figure it out.

Trust no one. I worked for years with a guy who was eventually convicted of possessing and trafficking child pornography. I ate lunch with him, told jokes with him and even invited him to parties over the years. But, even in total ignorance to his depraved hobby, at no time would I ever have trusted him for five minutes in a room with my boys. Furthermore, I wouldn't trust you and you shouldn't trust me and neither one of us should be offended by that.

Truth is, we're not likely to ever see these maniacs, but they are out there -- maybe even next to you right now. Trust no one, stay on high alert with your little ones, but, and this is important, know when to let go. Someday, disengage, confident you made them ready, trusting them to help themselves. Then you can rest and it will be much deserved.

(When you don't disengage, you become a "helicopter parent." For my attempt at understanding these parents, you might want to read a previous post of mine: "Why Your Dad is Like Othello.")

Climbing through the Window

History can be dates and numbers. It can be stories of adventure or explanation of the most banal actions and it can be a record of business deals and governmental edicts. But real history is a 5, 500 year-old shoe found in an Armenian cave. Real history is a man in the black and white foreground, wearing a narrow-brimmed cap, glancing sideways at a photographer (at you) as a picture is clicked of a gigantic crowd at an 1894 Boston Beaneaters baseball game (source). Real history is the worn velvet of a couch in Dove Cottage where Coleridge used to sit talking to Wordsworth on cold Grasmere nights. It is the connecting of "now" to "then" in a way that chills us to the core and makes us realize that people in 1732 used to get toe-itches with their shoes on; that women in 550 AD and in 1943 sometimes had "bad hair days." History is the floor of the old Globe Theater that was made out of packed dirt and hazelnut shells carelessly dropped and trampled underfoot to the hardness of cement by the snacking groundlings, over time. Real history is a boy lying on his bed, lightly tossing a ball up and down on a lonely summer day in 1910. And it is the American quarter I once tossed into the Thames river, off of the tower bridge, just to leave an imprint of my presence in London.

Real history is the unedited film below, taken from the front of a streetcar in San Francisco, probably a week before the great earthquake of 1906 and the devastating fire it caused. Here, you can see images of long-dead people: boys riding the bumpers of cars; a man stealing a ride on the back of a cart being looked back at by the annoyed driver; people hamming it up for the new-fangled motion picture camera; women in bustles and floral hats dodging the streetcars; men who walk with the same gait as guys in jeans and T-shirts today, only in dark suits with hats; drivers of automobiles cutting in and out between horse-drawn carriages; children on the way home from school, books in tow; professional men crossing Market Street discussing upcoming meetings.

This video is history in its most staggering sense. Here you'll see people with heartbeats who are gone, but who were alive at the moment the camera crossed their paths and etched them into history's living rock forever, whether they died in flames and collapse in the 'quake or in their sleep, decades later. People like us, looking through the window of time directly at us.

(Stick with this -- there is a lot of rolling and flutter in the beginning, but it stays clear for most of the time afterward. Although it is dated 1905 in the title, historians believe this was shot perhaps a week before the earthquake.)

HAT TIP: Gina Matarazzo Stewart

On Second Thought: Kill

Here's an idea. Let's have children. Let's cuddle them, kiss them, love them, provide for them, teach them gentleness and kindness. Let's watch them sleep as we wonder what sort of people they will be some day. Let's teach them to respect their neighbors and life in general. Let's comfort them when they are afraid and tell them that God loves everyone.

Then, let's teach them to have aspirations -- to do well in school and to plan for a rich future with kids of their own to whom they can pass the same values we hold. Let's send our kids the message that they can be the architects of their respective futures. It is important for them to believe that they can do anything they want to. Dreams are theirs to snatch at speed, like those shiny rings on old-fashioned merry-go-rounds.

Above all, let's teach them that the worst thing they can be is a bully. "Do unto others" and all that. Live and let live. Let's teach them to make their own choices -- be an individual -- and to allow others to choose for themselves and to respect those choices of religion, lifestyle, moral codes, standards of dress, etc.

Ultimately, let's smile as our children bring forth children of their own -- new little ones to bathe in the warm waters of love. Let's be happy grandparents because the circle is complete. Let's give our kids a little speech on their children's birthdays about how the kids need to come first -- how family is everything.

Then, to wrap it all up, let's take one of the boys, jam an M-4 rifle into his hands and tell him it is his patriotic duty shoot other people with it and send him in to a brutal desert somewhere where he can get his brains spattered against a rock at the very moment his little baby loses her first tooth and puts it into an envelope so she can show Daddy that night when they talk on the computer.

Or maybe Daddy gets lucky and comes home one day, if broken to pieces by the horrors he has seen -- horrors he wasn't ready for, because we loved him so much. Because we taught him the opposite of what we eventually made him endure.

And they all lived shattered ever after.

This little fable is not a statement against patriotism or the military. It's not an evaluation of war, either. It's about a conundrum. Our kids, with very few exceptions, do not grow up preparing to fight. Basic training does not cover the gap: ours is not a warrior culture, high school football notwithstanding. Daddy is not Odysseus or some clan-leader drinking blood out of the skulls of the vanquished. He is a teacher or an accountant, or a carpenter or the owner of a store or a guy who loves to take care of his lawn. Our kids are not ready for carnage and the stench of death. None of them are really tough enough. That's the tragedy. That's the conundrum.

Even the survivors don't completely survive war. So, there are two options: revert to making killing machines out of our kids or figure out a way to end war. This middle ground is not acceptable. We can't go on asking common teachers, accountants and carpenters, owners of stores and cutters of lawns to blow other humans apart. It's inhuman and cruel to everyone involved. Casualty tallies would be even higher if we would remember that a young person can die without dying.

We need to figure out whether, as Bono says in "Peace on Earth," the lives of our kids are "bigger than any big idea." I think they are at least as big.