Two Stories from Mock-Elections’ Past

The first time we went to kindergarten, a year young, was a presidential election year. It wasn’t just an election year for the grown-ups, no. See, they just can’t help but find it adorable to provide little children with a tiny-person version of their own, hollow, big-person rituals. So it was that a few weeks after Halloween, I found myself ushered out of my safe classroom with the piano and the small, wooden boat-shaped see-saw with the rest of the class. We lined up and marched down to the big gym, single file, the boy in the front carrying our totemic Letter Person in front of him, like medieval foot-soldiers carried their army’s banner into battle, ready to engage in some really important stuff.

That really important stuff was heading into curtained booths wherein a stack of big white sheets of paper with a picture of Ronald Reagan and a picture of Walter Mondale on them sat, waiting for us. We each took turns going into the booths alone, to stare at the two, big smiling old-man faces, and then put a big X in the square under the face we wanted for president. The face we wanted for president, invariably would be the same face that we’d seen our parents or other in-home guardians smile at, praise, cheer for and listen to intently on the T.V. screen. For me, that face was Walter Mondale’s since, I was given to understand by my dad’s angry mutterings and exasperated hollers, if the Reagan face won the country would fall apart, everyone without a billion dollars would get thrown out on the street to forage through dumpsters, and the world itself would probably end.

My dad was a true believing Democrat then and still is. Back then, at four, so was I. But I didn’t know better. I’d say most adults, if they consider themselves Democrats or Republicans, still don’t know any better.

I put the X under the smiling Mondale face, deposited the top sheet of paper into a mysterious tin-foil-covered and lidded garbage bin, and exited the booth, praying in my head that all would turn out well, that the kids of Oakdale Elementary school would be on the side of the people and not the side of all those “damn idiots” who loved that “blood thirsty, crap actor.”

An hour later, the school secretary, who my brother once referred to as “Mrs. Fat Lady” when he couldn’t remember her name, came on the loudspeaker to announce the winner. In a landslide, it was the Reagan face. I felt deeply disappointed in my fellow students. I also began to feel a little nervous, distressed even. I didn’t want to live in a dumpster and eat garbage. And though I couldn’t quite picture it, I didn’t want to find out what it would be like for the world to end.

About a week later, I stayed up in our poorly-lit living room, with my dad as all the results came in from state after state after state. Reagan. Reagan. Reagan. Over and over again, the results from the states repeated that same name with the TV screen showing that same “crap actor” face: Reagan. Each time that name was attached to yet another state of the Union, my dad let out a dammit or, later, a goddammit. And each time, I became more and more frightened about the impending refuse-munching apocalypse it portended.

By the time the election got called, I’d begun crying hysterically. My dad turned and patted me on the shoulder and hugged me and told me that it was bad, but it wasn’t the end of the world. This, of course, confused me immensely.

In junior high, another presidential election took place. The school administration, just like the one at my elementary school so long ago, decided to hold their own election. Something to make the pubescent teens, just like their post-pubescent parents, feel like they were really participating in something real, big, and important. This time around, though, things were different.

The junior high ballot listed that year’s Republican, Democrat and a diminutive, Southern-drawled billionaire. However, one group of mischief makers, had come across the name of some ex-military guy with a funny-sounding name and a big gut who had also run for president. They organized a campaign to get as many students as possible to write-in this bloated, ex-Special Forces guy’s name as their vote. They didn’t know anything about him other than it would be a great lark to have this military-fatigued nobody (and he was a nobody to us because he wasn’t on TV) get as many votes as possible in an election that didn’t mean anything anyway.

So “Bo” Gritz won our school’s election.

Now, we junior high kids didn’t know Bo Gritz was a shady, Right-wing spook with ties to the racist Christian Identity Movement and I doubt we would have lobbied for him if we had more upon which to base our teenage mock-insurrection than the fact that his name sounded ridiculous to us. We were just having fun at the expense of the people leading us through yet another ceremony of overly serious bullshit.

I hazard to guess, though, that some folks in the school administration and the local newspaper did know about Col. Gritz suspect actions and character because, when the results were published in our daily print mediocrity of record, the Republican candidate was listed as having won our school’s mock election. Maybe, though, the change in the official results had nothing to do with Gritz the person, but simply had to do with the fact that Gritz the name shouldn’t have even been on the radar. He wasn’t even supposed to be an option.

Maybe?

We kids didn’t know any better, but maybe we should have. Then again, the same goes for the adults.

Who knows.

Do with the above two stories whatever you will.

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