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Show The Park Record Saturday, November 11,2000 More dogs on Main... By Tom Clyde T A-16 -VT A '"13 f 1 K JH 'vvav Jkr ?V. I T;,-TTTiHiriTnn ; Mi.n.-ir 7 U mm G7 . rs?. Apollo Swivel glider, rocker recliner. This is the most comfortable chair you ever sat in. ' Sale-$1,599 Comfort with Class. This is your opportunity to purchase our most - comfortable chairs at our most comfortable prices ever! Both chain available for 35 day delivery guaranteed before ' Thanksgiving in full SJ grjn, aniline dyed, glove soft leather. Ik -J -7 Filmore Press back in this chair to a reclining position and put your feet up on the ottoman ... you may never want to get up. Chair and Ottoman - $1,999 j.ni rat Bring your dreams to Norwalk. www n w alkfumititmittiL t-om NORWALK' THE FURNITL'RE IDEA HGEastWindifsiErSc Munay 293-3223 &adx rfFaii Plt MJNon d Bodm) W (ton Vfci Hi 10 SmwU 10 Spndw t-5 2 "ujdj&W Prices Effective November 12 - 14, 2000 Sunday, Monday & Tuesday . l .v.'s Green, Red er Romaine LEAF t lEnUCE! 4r rzL ! I J II I 111! IIM .-:Mn 1 III I. .1-Jj 8 Inch VN Nwm5J?pMd!,', APPLE v NAVEL , ... ! J ORANGES! ! lY" V PIES! v ' - - ' , i - -. i - I I i - I I- I Ttv 8 Pi Gold Ki.t It now I- I. nn- r,, n.i ,n, , 8 Piece Geld Kist : FRIED CiilCICEIl! JOOO Half GoBoi AtMrttd PtcbUm list Isnny ICE CQEAfA! o uu 0 Haiti Invades Florida to supervise election i,- Well, ihe presidential election went exactly as planned . . As a result of the election, nobody is president. pres-ident. Missouri elected a dead guy to the Senate. Strom Thrumond has been looking for somebody to keep him company for a long time. If that isnt reform, well, I don't know what is: Nobody for president and dead guys in Congress. We got by just fine with nobody as president for most of the second Reasan term, there's no reason it wonl Elect work aeain. enough dead guys to Congress, and they might actually get something some-thing done. As I'm writing this on Thursday, the situation is still kind of messv. Gore Florida state judge making the decisions. And when they try to decide if a guy in the army who has been hung oerseas for 15 years is really a resident of Florida, it's up to Florida law to make the mles. That's great. These are the same folks who brought us the Elian Gonzales mess. Now they are going to choose the President. 1 wonder what if that fisherman guy has found work yet. 1 was able to contact a noted Florida election Iawer, Algonquin J. Calhoun, who explained won the popular vote b' a couple of hundred something U0D6, We got by just fine with nobody as president for most of the second Reagan term, there's no reason it won't Jo " k ou 1 ?nr 9 Florida election law. the work again, tlect enough dead guys to Congress, and they might actually get thousand votes out of a total of nearly HK) million. mil-lion. But he doesnl have MaMaaaaHM enough electoral votes to win without winning Florida. Bush lost the popular vote nationally, but seems to think he will win Florida, and as a result, will end up w ith the electoral votes to win the election. So that's screwed up worse than the tax code to begin with. Then in Florida, there are all kinds of problems with the way they ran the election. They printed the ballots in huge type for the old folks down there, but then the holes in the punch cards didn't line up with the names of the candidates. Most of Palm Beach County residents are retirees from New York. As many as 1S.()(X) people who thought they were voting for Joe Lieberman (and that guy running with him) ended up punching out the wrong hole and voting for Pat Buchanan by mistake. Buchanan! Oi vey! And then there are thousands of absentee ballots coming in from military bases all around the world. Those voters claim they all live in Florida because there is no state income tax. They wanted to vote for former Defense Secretary Dick Chene (and that guy running with him). And then there are these Public Television pledge drive tote bags full of ballots that keep showing up. It's ail very strange. If this election had occurred in Haiti, the President (if we had one) would send in troops to overturn the results and supervise a new election. Jimmy Carter would be there to oversee the voting with other UN observers. That probably wont happen here. But to be on th; safe side, the Coast Guard is on red alert in case the Haitians get some wild idea about invading Disney World to restore democratic government. What's even more strange is that, under our system of federalism, even though it was an election to choose the President of the United States, the actual rules of how the voting works in each state are governed gov-erned by the individual state laws. In Utah, for example, it is a felony to vote for a Democrat. So when they get into a big lawsuit over whether they have to count the "i-meant-to-vote-for-Gore-not-Buchanan" votes, which may be enough to tip the election one way or the other, it will be a contested election will be invalidated, and instead, the winner will be chosen by the Board of Trustees of the Del Boca Vista - Tom Clyde Condominium. Pha-e II. aaHBaaH In all probability, the next president ol the United States will be Jerry Seinfeld's father. We could do worse. Bush or Gore could win. The whole thing has given the stock market mar-ket a case of the electoral fantods. Locally. I've noticed people are alreadv taking the ""English only" proposition to heart. All over Utah, people are trying to learn English. 1 ve heard there is a protest movement from some of the rural counties to file suit to get a court to rule that "Wew umV is just about the same as English. It will be fun to watch the state legislature trying to conduct its business in English, which is only rarely spoken there now. The Arts and Recreation Mafia got their special sales tax passed, vhich brings me to the next big campaign cam-paign and a suggestion on where to spend all that cash. The center of the roundabout is vacant. Though I'm not a big proponent of public art (because most of it is crap selected by government officials who are barely adequate at filling potholes, and really stink at selecting public art), this is a location that demands some sort of monument to distract drivers in the roundabout. I want a piece that commemorates and defines the last 30 years of Park City history That was the ski bum era. It was a time when we drove ' buses and lived in old houses with plastic over the windows to keep the cold out. and paid sometimes it) a month in rent (and often 2 or 3 times that in the heating bill). If we donl lay claim to the site soon, it will get filled with chrome Olvmpic gewgaws, gew-gaws, which seem to be sprouting up all over town like too many cell phone antennae. The suggestions for the center of the roundabout so far are: Just stick a big track hoe out there and leave it to rust. W hat better to define the last 30 years than a piece of construction equipment dead in the middle of the road. The other option is a statue of a barn-door VW bus with dogs leaning out of the front windows, skis on top, and two pairs of bare feet pressed against the back windshield. Or we could erect a statue of our next president: Nobodv. -...,,,.., , Don't get me started By Gary Weiss When Is a Vote, Not a Vote? L 11 A You know, there's really not much in this life that we can dependably count on. But over the years, I've learned that when my spirit feels Ike it does now; with all the hope and verve of warmed over yogurt, that I can always look to one man to make me feel even wwse. Somehow, although he died years before I was born, he had an uncanny ability to just about perfectly encapsulate encap-sulate my own feelings, when I'm too discouraged to think for myself. That is. of course, the single most depressing human being to have ever become famous: Soren Kierkegaard. Clearly, he could never have become famous today, when "Men Are from Mars. Women Are from Venus" counts as "philosophy", but; sad to say. old Soren has always been a fnend to me. Amazingly: even to myself, as a life-long Democrat and an American baby-boomer with a genetic predisposition predis-position towards pessimism and curmudgeonality. I'd been able to retain my belief in the genius and majesty of the American political system for nearly half a century. centu-ry. This, after only two people for whom I've ever voted for President have won. no senators or governors, and very few congressmen. Even after the reality of Congressman Sonnv Bono. Even after running for county commissioner mvself. and losing. Qfjf system IS Structured SO 3S tO 0U3f-I 0U3f-I accepted that mv views were more lib- , erai than most, that i would lose more antee that my presidential vote is, as a cAcnAanmil.bullbeinthe Demcm j g fierceJv RepUDHCan ' But today, my mindset is that of old sfafe, quite literally meaningless. " feel as if 1 w ere a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved." Probably more to the point, as my neighbor Joram, who is somewhat of. a contemporary philosopher himself, him-self, said as I signed in to vote. "You're a Democrat, you might just as well vote tomorrow." He was right, and not just because my candidate appears to have lost. Like Kierkegaard's chess piece, our system is structured so as to guarantee that my presidential vote is. as a Democrat in a fiercely Republican state, quite literally meaningless. Now in state elections, that s not true; a vote cast is counted as a real vote. The candidate with the most votes wins. But it's the dirty little secret of our demxr-racy demxr-racy that, for the office of President, the count of the popular vote is secondary to that of the Electoral College. In fact, we donl vote for President at all; technically, we vote for Electors, who then: winner take all, vote for President. Its possible, and ! think this actually happened hap-pened when Kennedy beat The Evil One: Richard Nixon, that he lost the popular vote by a slim margin, but won the electoral vote, and thus the election. At this point. I'm too confused to know if Gore would have won by the straight popular vote, but in this most dermicratK of democracies, this structural state of affairs is shameful. And unfortunately, even if w want to change this, it's no easy matter. For this is mandated by no mere law or regulation, but rather by the highest law of the land; and the most difficult to change: the United States Constitution. Article II. Section 1 of that document states: (2) "Each State shall appoint...a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress...". It then goes on to say that those guys then vote, and the winner is then the President. At least constitutionally, these Electors arent even bound to follow the results of the popular vote. For those who might remember the long and king struggle for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have Constitutionally guaranteed legi?I equality for women in this country, amending the Constitution is astoundingly difficult. And that's what it would take to fix this whole Electoral College nonsense. But. in truth, that's not what I find nust discouraging about this election, although it's a worthy target. Then again, with a straight vote count, incredible as it may seem. Ralph Nader would have wound up as the most critical factor in this election. It's reasonable to assume that most of the votes he got would have otherwise gone to Gore. But because of that Electoral College crap. 1 cant even be mad at Nader, it's doubtful that he had any impact whatsoever on the elect Km of the Electors. No, the worst of it is that like Kierkegaard's chess piece, Gary Weiss only half of us voted. And THAT, is w hat s truly shameful. shame-ful. And. finally, so discouraging. Ami that's why I feel like Kierkegaard's chess piece. I cant even begin to figure out what to do about it. In the last century, tens of millions of people around the world died try ing to win this right that so many of us so easily blow off. But in this country, that's part of the deal. The freedom to do, is balanced by the equal freedom free-dom not to do. That's our system, and because of it, we get who we get. Clearly, a h-ige part of the voting population popu-lation feels no attachment whatsoever to the political process. To the point that spending twenty minutes to vote, once every four years, is simply too great an effort to make. So. Last week. 1 mentioned this quote from the Greek philosopher Plato, written 2400 yean ago, "The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take pan in the government, is to live under the government of worse men." The school he founded lasted 9) years, and taught such minds as Aristotle. I wonder how he'd feel to know that after all that, after all the turmoil and wars; hot and cold, many of them fought over this very issue of political politi-cal choice, not a damned thing has changed Gary How w the fonntr owner of fMvi B,Hksntrr and has served on the Summit Co. Planning CommLssHW. Park Citv at 1500 Snow Creek Drive WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO LIMIT QUANTITIES. NO DEALERS |