It has been brought to my attention that I should advise my tallow-headed readership on the importance of occupying the voting-stalls in the coming months. Well, God damn you, by all means, do so! See if it changes your paltry lives in the slightest to send Harding packing back to his richly opiated Irish mistress! Put some straw-hatted prince of the moving-daguerreotypes in the White House! Repeat the follies of the past! Elect a dray-horse again, for all I care!
Of course, being the wealthy publisher of the greatest news-paper in the Republic, I see no need to vote. After all, why bother choosing the monkey when you can own the organ-grinder? It is a known fact that in the future, the president will be hand-picked by the ruling elite of that secret society known as the Rotarians, with a governor of a former Confederate state thrown in every few terms for variety’s sake. I myself signed off on the plan before you were whelped, and it has ensured that I stay rich and powerful long after I should have been dead.
However, the voting-franchise is a good and useful ruse, and by dribbling it out piece-meal over the years to all and sundry, you have been given a false sense of progress that is convincing, indeed. It has, however, made a mess of the laws! In a proper country, the vote would only be given to good, solid men, preferably property-owners over the age of 35, not to those excessively dusky of skin, nor to Jews and Mohammedans. That is democratic enough for me!
Though there are precious few restrictions on the vote now-a-days, I take comfort in the fact that some standards are still up-held. We have not yet had an Irish-Catholic in the White House, mercifully sparing us all the Papist manipulation, drunken womanizing, and regrettable necessity of assassination which that would entail. Women have not yet achieved the right to befoul the polls with their hoop-skirted cackling. And, at last report, the votes from the entire God-forsaken state of Texas are still thrown, uncounted and burning, into the River Charles.
So, yes, by all means, vote. Do away with those pestilential Whigs and Free-Soilers! Restore the Fire-Eaters to the seat of power! Exercise your right to experience the illusion of political choice! It shall make my advisors happy, after all, and I can go back to planning my upcoming twice-annual shit in relative peace.
T. Herman Zweibel, the great grandson of Onion founder Friedrich Siegfried Zweibel, was born in 1868, became editor of The Onion at age 20, and persisted in various editorial posts until his launching into space in 2001. Zweibel’s name became synonymous with American business success in the 20th century. Many consider him the “Father Of American Journalism,” also the title of his well-known 1943 biography, written by Norman Rombauer.
