The Clueless Youth Vote
By Hans Zeiger (10/01/04)
The reason I’m an optimist about the future of America is because I tend to think that MTV does not speak for young Americans. But if I’m wrong, if the MTV generation is as perverted and spiritually impoverished as its namesake, then we might as well elect Drew Barrymore president in a few years and get this country all over with.
Miss Barrymore, the 28-year old blond Hollywoodite, is “a repressed voter,” she says in her new MTV documentary “The Best Place to Start.” As a young person who is admittedly clueless about the whole voting thing, Barrymore wants other clueless young people to rise up and turn out to the polls on November 2.
Barrymore decided to make a documentary when she discovered that only 36 percent of 18 to 24 year olds voted in 2000. Considering this the worst political tragedy since the pre-1965 repression of the black vote, Barrymore toured the country to ask the question, “Why?”
After conversations with shady characters from Capitol Hill, Drew Barrymore concluded that no one in the nation’s capitol cares about young people. It is a depressing cycle, she says; young people don’t vote, politicians don’t listen to young people, and therefore, young people don’t vote.
“When I got home [from Washington, DC] I just felt hopeless,” she moans. Then Miss Barrymore is shown in her office, broken down into miserable sobs and laments as she admits to her agent, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Way to establish credibility for yourself.
Drew Barrymore’s plausibility as a political expert dropped further when she was interviewed about the documentary on CBS, home of the folks who both grant Dan Rather’s paycheck and own MTV. Insofar as John Kerry is the candidate of the indecisivists, Drew Barrymore is a natural Kerry constituent. When it comes to taking a political position, she declares, “I don't know where I stand. I just want to find the right person.”
Actually, the film is a thoroughly liberal and Democratic affair. Such would we expect, but don’t call it unbiased.
Barrymore’s contacts for the film seem to have come out of a standard Hollywood rolodex. Interviews include Senator Hillary Clinton, California Congressman Henry Waxman, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, General Wesley Clark, Michael Moore, Democratic strategist James Carville, Hip Hop Action Summit leaders Russell Simmons and Benjamin Chavis, Left wing punk rocker Fat Mike, and members of a nomadic hippie tribe of Dennis Kucinich supporters. The one and only Republican shown in the documentary is strategist Ralph Reed.
While Drew Barrymore can spend an hour’s documentary bemoaning the insignificance of the youth vote, and MTV spends months interrupting its Gomorrahic programs with messages about Choosing or Losing – MTV has yet to touch the question of what it takes to be a qualified voter.
When Miss Barrymore asked Bill Maher to comment on youth voting apathy, he replied wisely, “Voting is for old people, and being stupid is for young people.” Offended by Maher’s reply, Barrymore went out to do something – anything – anything at all to register more stupid people to vote.
She paid a visit to a Hip Hop Action Summit where thousands of young hip hoppers were being registered to vote for the first time. When I made the suggestion several months back that the Hip Hop Action Summit was a perversion of responsible republican politics, the hate mail flowed. Columnist Jason Alston of the Henderson Dispatch in North Carolina called me “un-American” four times in a single column for my declaration that voting is a privilege rather than a right. Writes Alston: “It doesn't matter how aware or unaware of the issues you are, or what kind of music you listen to, or even how mainstream or far-out your personal beliefs are, if you are at least 18 and not a convicted felon, it is your right, even your duty, as an American citizen to participate in the election process.”
I reassert that voting is not a right; voting is a privilege. A right is a guarantee that all people have, but in the United States there are conditions attached to voting. Two of those conditions, rightly institutionalized in our system of law, are age and the absence of felony records. A third condition that tends to regulate itself effectively within a free society is education.
A University of New Hampshire student interviewed for “The Best Place to Start” summarizes her view of the job description for teachers and professors: “I feel it’s your job as educators to say ‘you guys should go out and vote.’” Actually, the duty of an educator is to teach his students the basis for voting.
Education is a precondition for republican government. It is not mere coincidence that high school graduation generally occurs in the same year as a citizen may register to vote. Certainly, government cannot enforce a test for people who seek to register to vote, nor should it ever. But we do have compulsory education in America, and with good reason.
The purpose of education is to make good citizens – citizens who understand the moral responsibilities of self-government. It is a mission higher than creating successful producers in the world economy, higher than allowing students to bask in self-esteem, higher than raising awareness of diversity, and higher than feeding the power lusts of the masses by blindly registering youngsters to worship at the altar of Demos.
The best place to start is not the polling place, Miss Barrymore. The best place to start is education.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Hans Zeiger
