Phthursday Musings: I Voted

Let’s get right to it, kids:

This wonderful, wonderful thing is the creation of Hudson Rowan, a 14 year old genius from Marbletown, New York. It is a submission to a contest to create an “I Voted” sticker held by Ulster County, New York’s Board of Elections. The submission is of course winning. You can see the competitors here.

My friend Rudy points out that the real tragedy of this is that Mr. Rowan might lose a whole shit-ton of dollars on hot t-shirts. He is of course right (although the branding rights have been given to him, so… maybe?) I myself will absolutely buy a shirt, if I know the proceeds will be going to this incredible young man.

This excitement is all of course a tremendous distraction from the reality that democracy in America is a thorough disaster, increasingly squeezed in a direction where majoritarian values are overriden by horrific extremists who have successfully gamed the system.

Core to all of this is the way that language has been gamed. I won’t go into a long diversion here, but I’ll say this: to the extent possible, I’m going to stop using the words “conservative” and “liberal” when discussing current politics, and I strongly recommend you all do the same as well. It’s true that there are a lot of other words which have nebulous meanings at this point as well, but the two above have been distended so badly and in so many ways which have contributed to a kleptocratic takeover.

As much as I like the “I Voted” sticker that Ulster County is about to get, I think we need another one, one with a little more language, something kind of like this:

They Tried To Stop Me, But Damn Right I VOTED!

The graphic can be Hudson Rowan’s spider crab, leaping over a set of racing hurdles.

One of the places where things get super dissonant is how on the one hand people champion the idea of stripping away obstacles to voting and encouraging the broadest possible participation, but then on the other hand people diss voting and say it’s not nearly enough and hardly matters anyway. And my observation is that the people saying these two polarized things tend to be the same people - if not literally, at least in broad strokes, it’s hardcore lefties, and, well… yes, both things can be true, but the latter really tends to undermine the former, doesn’t it?

The messaging, I think, has to be that for all of the obvious problems with American democracy, JUST GO VOTE. Vote even when the choices stink. Vote even when most of the races are uncontested. Through a laser focus on the idea that everyone should vote, we build upon that. If we can’t even focus on the most basic of concepts - universal suffrage means universal suffrage - then how can we expect to achieve better voting systems, better access for candidates to get on the ballot, public financing, etc.?

And I think this is why I am especially enamored with the spider crab: it undermines the stodginess of participatory democracy without actually undermining participatory democracy.

Sometimes when I get to thinking about these things, this song enters the mind:

”The Candidate” is off Urge Overkill’s 1991 The Supersonic Storybook. Oh, jeepers, here’s the digression:

UO’s breakthrough album was their major label debut Saturation which came out in 1993. The lead single was “Sister Havana”, which was a perfect alt-rock breakthrough single, big crunchy guitar, a completely ridiculous pretense, singing about Fidel Castro, etc. A few weeks ago I wrote about being on a riding mower outside of the veterinary hospital. I have a weird distinct memory of hearing “Sister Havana” while on that riding mower.

I got my copy of Saturation using a Media Play gift certificate I’d been given for my birthday. I believe the other thing I got with that gift certificate was The Doors’ Greatest Hits (but that’s a much bigger digression that we won’t get into here.) The thing about getting Saturation is that, never mind that it was a major label album, that it sold a bunch of copies, whatever. I was, to the best of my knowledge, the first person I knew to get a copy. Admittedly this is ridiculous, but it was one of the first little steps I made toward indie rock and this whole silly persona I wound up cultivating in college.

Not long after getting Saturation, I got my hands on Americruiser / Jesus Urge Superstar, via winning a free CD by virtue of calling in to WXRX’s Sunday night blues show and answering a trivia question, or some wacky thing like that. This disc was a combination of their first two albums and was released on Touch & Go, a point which would have been lost to me at the time, but which meant it was the first album I’d bought that was on one of the big important venerable indie labels of the era.

At some point thereafter I got The Supersonic Storybook and also somewhere along the way I got the Stull EP. It was the latter which blew up spectacularly in late 1994, because that was the disc on which you could first find UO’s cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”, which fully entered the zeitgeist by way of Pulp Fiction.

For whatever it’s worth, as a freshman in college, with a growing but still smaller collection, Supersonic Storybook was on heavy personal rotation. I think if you’d asked me over the summer of 1995, I’d have cited UO as one of my five favorite bands, and might have even cited Supersonic Storybook as my favorite album of theirs.

I got to see them that November at the Riviera, touring behind the new album Exit the Dragon. This show was during the heyday of pointless crowd surfing. At one point some dude looked at me and said, You want up? I said no or nah or shook my head, something clearly conveying that I did not need up. Then he said: You’re going up. This is where things get a little fuzzy. Best as I can remember, dude grabbed my ankles, and somebody else must have half-grabbed my upper body. Suddenly I was off the ground, parallel to the floor, facing down. But instead of surfing, which would have involved being passed around the crowd, I somehow slowly got pushed up, to where I felt like I was standing on top of someone’s shoulders… then slowly came down back to the parallel-to-the-floor-position… then got dropped on the floor.

As it turned out it was the last proper Urge Overkill show for a long long time. Heroin will do that sort of thing to a band. So I hear.