You Can Vote

Because I keep running into smart people who say that they're not going to vote, what follows is a bit of wisdom from David Foster Wallace on voting (from Up, Simba):

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

I love that last point! But the irony is that people who don't vote have already internalized that point. On some level, they experience the act of not voting precisely as a vote, an act, a redemption of agency. But DFW reminds us that the compensatory feeling of agency derived from one's recalcitrant refusal to vote ultimately amounts to a relinquishment of one's political agency. Such is the double-bind of all actions motivated by the duplicitous feeling of ressentiment.

So this post is just intended to say that yes, you can . . .