Votin' or Fishin'? Summer 1996

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It is easy, all too easy, for this generation simply to write off politics. I know this to be true. I've done it at least a dozen times myself. But just coming off my biannual two-week stint in the big city swamp of DC politics, I am always left a bit dazed. DC is truly a remarkable city. I love it even as I loathe most of that for which it stands. Sure '96 promises to be the most uninspiring Presidential election since Hoover vs. Smith in 1928. (Don't remember? Don't need to.) And yes, voter apathy, alienation, and anger is palpable (Dick Lamm as a serious Third Party Presidential candidate?). Maybe my civic stint in DC has blinded me, maybe this teacher of suspicion has himself been trapped by the smooth speech of the Potomac crowd. Maybe. But let me suggest that it's worthwhile for this angst-ridden, alienated, and politically disaffected X-generation at least to consider the possibility that political engagement has something to commend it—that politics does not serve as merely the feed trough for lower forms of life.

Now I must confess that in national politics currently practiced, understood, and imaged for us by the media, there is very little reason for hope. A number of students of politics point to the meaninglessness of what passes for elections in our day. Lance Bennett in his text, Governing Crisis, writes of how "most Americans today experience elections as empty rituals that offer little hope for political dialogues, genuine glimpses of candidate character, or the emergence of a binding consensus on where the nation is going and how it ought to get there."

If this is what politics is all about, by all means, go fishing and send a signal: "Leave us alone." The problem, while too difficult to unravel ...

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