Strange and bizarre. Bizarre and strange. Macabre, even. How else can one explain an election in which the candidate favoured to win is dead?
The election in question is for Sheriff of San Mateo County, California. Incumbent Brendan Maguire died of a heart attack in the midst of the campaign. Rather than allow the other candidate, a man whose past and behaviour are suspect, to win the election, county officials would like to see Maguire elected instead. This may seem like a reasonable course of action in California, but the implications for the democratic process everywhere are staggering.
Can we, for instance, expect dead candidates in future elections? Will, say, George Washington or Abraham Lincoln be pressed into running for President in 1988? The advantages are obvious: a party could put up a candidate who had proven his ability in the past. Even if it was the distant past. The major drawback, that the candidate was no longer, strictly speaking, alive, would pose no problem because of the San Mateo County precedent.
What sort of campaign would one run for a dead candidate? One would assume that public appearances would have to be kept to a bare minimum, with TV or radio debates with opponents being right out. Kissing babies would also be unlikely, although, if manipulated well, there seems to be no reason for avoiding handshaking and good-natured slaps on the back. (Perhaps the candidate could kiss a dead baby?) Dead candidates can be moved among large crowds, if little else.
The candidate’s platform could consist of two separate sets of positions: one formed when the candidate was alive, the other formed since he died. “Having had a chance to reflect on the important issues of the day…” a typical television advertisement for such a campaign might start. This method has the added advantage of making the candidate’s real position virtually impossible to pin down.
In practice, dead candidates would be a boon to the experts, advisers and bureaucrats who make up such a large part of the political machinery. A dead candidate would, naturally, listen patiently to whatever his advisers wanted him to hear. And, the bureaucrats would find dead candidates especially open to manipulation on policy questions.
Of course, there is no reason to stop there. Enlisting dead people to work on the actual campaigns could help a poor party keep its costs down. And, there is no reason to believe that dead staff would work any less hard than live volunteers.
This leads to the question of allowing dead people to vote. This has, indeed, occurred in many elections in the past, although it was frowned upon; there were those who felt it was more a political fraud than a serious expression of the power of an emerging minority group. However, if one allows dead candidates, it will be difficult to refuse dead voters.
The critical question is how well one can get dead voters out to register. Traditionally, the dead minority has shown little interest in the democratic process. This is confounded by the fact that few dead people have telephones, making them difficult to contact in the middle of a registration drive. On the other hand, personal visits, not usually feasible for live voters, might work for dead voters because they can usually be found in high-density population areas.
As the dead become more involved in the electoral process, it might not be unreasonable to expect them to set up their own lobbying organization in Washington. Equal employment opportunity legislation for the dead is one area in which an effective lobby group could benefit this minority. In fact, dead lobbyists might be welcomed in state capitals everywhere, their quiet insistence making a change from rowdy arms manufacturers and multinational capitalists.
It only takes a very small leap of faith to see the dawning of a whole sub-culture devoted to those who are, well, no longer mobilely self-sufficient. Imagine the confusion anthropologists would have in determining what constitutes a “living” culture.
From the beginning, “Born to Die” and “My mother was in a cemetery, but all she brought me back was this lousy t-shirt!” t-shirts would be all the rage, augmented by “Honk if you’re dead!” and “If you can’t read this, you probably shouldn’t be behind the wheel!” bumper stickers. (Would driving and other licences have to include DATE OF DEATH as well as DATE OF BIRTH questions?) Once the opportunists had vanished, however, it is conceivable that an entire service industry would spring up to care for this group’s very special needs.
Unfortunately, society as a whole may not be ready to accept the formerly living. Apartments might soon adopt an unwritten “living tenants only” policy, while wealthy home owners would not want dead people to move into their neighbourhoods for fear that their presence would drive property values into the ground. (It seems far less farfetched when you realize that de facto segregation already exists.) It isn’t hard to imagine gangs of young men, out to prove their masculinity, harassing dead people because “they aren’t like you or me.”
Unemployed people may come to resent the dead, especially those who become financially successful, claiming that they take jobs away from the living. I can sympathize with this point of view; I’m not sue I like the idea of having to compete with new work by the likes of Stephen Leacock, Mark Twain or H. L. Mencken.
Hmm…come to think of it, perhaps it would be best for all concerned if Brendan Maguire lost…