Not that citizens of other countries don’t vote, too, but our nation, still young compared to most, is unique in always having had a government voted in by its citizens. And we get a chance every four years to vote it out, too.
As our nearby cartoon suggests, voters may not be familiar with all the presidential candidates on their ballots. With a record 24 states holding primaries or caucuses on Super Tuesday next week, California voters have not had as much attention as we’re used to. Not that it will matter much, since it looks like many of the long-shot candidates have pulled out, leaving just three leading Democrats, Clinton, Edwards and Obama, and two Republicans, McCain and Romney. Of course, you can still cast a vote for Kucinich, say, or Keyes, in protest. What a system!
Some commentators bemoan the fact that the parties’ nominating conventions have become since the early ‘70s merely small coronations, rather than vehicles actually for selecting candidates. With delegates now committed to particular candidates, presidential elections have become two-stage affairs, with state-by-state popular voting in primary elections largely within parties, and then nationwide popular voting between single candidates from each party. Maybe this year, strong showings among the leading Democrats will throw the nomination to that party’s convention in late August; on the other hand, the nominations may be obvious after Tuesday, fully nine months before the general election.
Trusting Tech
We remark, perhaps not often enough, on the dramatic advances that are being made in technology. And not just in the publishing industry, where thoughts become bits that become print that you read, all seemingly “untouched by human hands,” as the expression goes. We see advances all over.
Take telecommunications. Dick Tracy from the ‘30s would feel right at home with today’s personal communications devices. It’s all computer-driven, of course, an industry where compute times halve and memory capacity doubles every two years. First postulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, that trend continues unabated more than 40 years later. Why buy an extended warranty these days on anything electronic, when it likely will become obsolete before it fails?
Take genetics. The Human Genome Project is a monumental undertaking, with 3 billion chemical base pairs in human DNA and some 20,000 different genes. Working in plants and lower animals, geneticists have been producing all manner of modified organisms, some microscopic to perform industrial tasks, and some big enough to eat, which we do, sometimes unwittingly.
Have we gotten too smart for our own good? Some people think so, worrying now about cloned animals grown for food. If only we could limit developments in some areas (we like our fresh, organic produce) while encouraging it in others. But progress, like time, waits for no man. This generation may be defined by how we manage, as a society, to accommodate that unstoppable force.
