Disorder In The Court

If you’re of a certain age (say, 30 to mid 40s), you might remember a little featurette of Saturday morning cartoons called “Schoolhouse Rock.” Using animation, these bits taught multiplication, grammar, etc. all set to music. Around that time, it was a popular educational fad that kids would learn better if the lessons were set to music, something they were naturally attuned to anyway (and especially so considering the concurrent popularity of the Jackson Five, the Archies, and other bubble-gum rock bands). It might have been successful. I just found them kind of stupid. But my favorites were the ones about how the government works. (“I’m just a bill, just a lonely old bill, and I’m sitting here on Capital Hill…”) To this day I can only remember the preamble to the Constitution by singing it. (“We the people…in order to form a more perfect union…”)

Which in a way is kind of sad.

But not sadder than the fact that I heard today. In a recent Zogby poll (as reported on NPR this morning), it was found that more people could name the Three Stooges (Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, right?) than the three houses of the US government. More people could name two of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs than two members of the Supreme Court.

Apparently these people were not watching “Schoolhouse Rock.”

Scarier still is that these people are American citizens who vote.

Which strengthens my argument that if you don’t know how your government is constructed and who is running it and basically what you’re voting for, then you shouldn’t be allowed within a hundred yards of a polling place.

So I propose the following: At the end of January, when we get those dreaded giant packets of tax forms, we should also get a pamphlet outlining how the US government functions, who the players are, and a summary of the important legislation currently on the table. It’s only right. If you own stock, every year you are sent an annual report indicating to you how they’re doing, who is running the operation and how much money they made. And every year or so, depending on how often they have a stockholder’s meeting, you are invited to vote on certain issues vital to the operation the company such as approving the Board of Directors.

Yet we (grumblingly, albeit) send our taxes off every April 15th to some post office box corresponding to the state we live in (except you lucky people living in Florida, but the penalty is exacted from your hide in other ways), and many of us don’t have a flying clue what is really being done with it – who gets it, who doesn’t get it, and why.

If I own a piece of this corporation, I want accountability. I want an annual report on the operations of the United States Government. If I’m being asked to vote on the Board of Directors, I want information. I want a little org chart of everyone who’s in charge. None of this State of the Union misty-eyed glad-handing crap. I want numbers. I want projections. I want to know, in detail, what you’ve been up to down in Washington. Hey, make it a comic book. Make a video and set it to music. Hook it on Phonics. Or whatever the current educational fad happens to be.

And then, about two months before election, send around a little questionnaire, similar to the census, quizzing us on what we’ve learned.

If you pass, you get to vote.

If not, sorry. Watch “Schoolhouse Rock” and try again next November.

Or, if you refuse the quiz on libertarian grounds but are one of those people who doesn’t know who their congressperson is, then simply stay home. Watch a DVD of the Stooges.

You might learn something.