Four Famous Firsties Who Weren't Really First*

They say that history is written by the victors, and by the Texas school board... and occasionally by a guy named Victor who happens to sit on the Texas school board. Victor thinks that Jesus put dinosaurs in the ground just to trick those know-it-all scientists, but his edits are still in committee.

Meanwhile, every kid in America knows who Christopher Columbus was, and most people have heard of Amerigo Vespucci, but I'll bet they couldn’t tell you what he did to get two continents and a Belgian/Brazilian-owned beer named after him. Rarer still are those who know anything about Martin Waldseemüller, the German cartographer who actually named the continents. Talk about having the right job at the right time.

Today, we live in an age when it seems like it’s all been done before, made evident by a box office that is dominated by sequels, prequels, adaptations and reboots. It’s the same old cultural junkfood, repackaged with a super-sized cup and a line of action figures. As human history unfolds, it becomes harder and harder to be the first at anything.

Consider then how much it must suck to have been the first at something that fundamentally changed the trajectory of human history, but for which someone else usually gets all the credit. These people got screwed out of the history books, and their ghosts are probably damned to shaking their fists for all of eternity.



Abner Doubleday Did Not Invent Baseball

Have you ever wondered why the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is located in Cooperstown, New York? On at least one of those long family road trips, surely someone has asked why the epicenter of America’s pastime is situated in a town with less than two thousand residents that is nowhere near an airport, a highway or a train station and about two hundred miles from the nearest Major League Baseball field. And he if asks again, so help me, this car is turning right back around.

In 1904, Albert Goodwill Spalding set out to prove that baseball was invented in the United States as part of a promotional campaign for the sporting goods that bear his name. A commission comprising executives from the American and National Leagues promised to determine the true origins of baseball within three years. On the last day of that three-year mandate, they concluded that it was invented in 1839 by Civil War General Abner Doubleday, who had created the sport in Cooperstown after watching a bunch of stupid kids who kept running into each other while playing ball.

According to the commission, Doubleday drew from his experience on the battlefield when he carved a diamond shape into the dirt and established some ground rules for the boys to follow. Thus baseball. So in 1907, the issue was settled once and for all, and in 1939, on the hundredth anniversary of Doubleday’s brilliant idea, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was built on that same hallowed ground where the celebrated war hero had once drawn in the mud with a stick.

The problem is, that story was entirely fabricated by Major League executives. All of it. Even Wikipedia refers to Doubleday as the “supposed inventor of baseball.” They don't even buy into the myth.

The truth is that America's national pastime was actually invented in England, where they had perfected boring decades earlier. Early versions of the sport have been described in books dating back as far as the mid-eighteenth century, when it was enjoyed almost exclusively by royalty. That is to say the all-American sport was actually invented by a bunch of British aristocrats playing with their balls.

The person who actually invented baseball as we know it was an American bookseller and volunteer fireman named Alexander Cartwright, who founded the Knickerbocker Baseball Club in 1845, where he established most of the rules that are still followed today, including the standard nine innings and nine players on the field. Cartwright was even inducted into the Hall of Fame at the opening ceremony, where he was officially recognized as the "father of modern baseball."

Alexander Fleming Did Not Develop the Drug Penicillin

Dr. Alexander Fleming was a British bacteriologist who is said to have accidentally discovered penicillin back in 1928 when he returned from vacation to find that his petri dishes were contaminated with a strange mold that inhibited the reproduction of certain bacteria. He wrote a paper about this curious phenomenon, but he lacked the background in chemistry that would be necessary for him to pursue this any further. Incidentally, the same thing happened to me when I left a gallon of milk in the fridge for three months -- except I didn't write a science paper about it, I just dared my friends to open it.

Fleming's article received very little attention until four years later, when Dr. Howard Florey, a professor of pathology at Oxford, happened upon it in the back pages of an academic journal and then began conducting experiments to isolate the active component of the penicillium mold that Fleming had described, a process which would keep him busy for the next ten years. During this time, Florey enlisted the help of a number of other scientists as well, including Dr. Ernst Chain and Dr. Norman Heatly, and collectively, it was these three men, along with their dozens of lab assistants, who were able to isolate and reproduce the antibiotic properties of penicillin.

However, in 1942, the idea of a single man as the savior of so many Allied troops  -- all because of a serendipitous mistake in the lab -- made for a much better story in the newsreels. Fleming certainly fit the role, even though he had very little to do with penicillin beyond his initial observations fourteen years earlier.

In 1945, when the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded "for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases," Florey and Chain did not appreciate having to share the credit with Fleming, while Heatly's contributions weren't even officially recognized. I can only imagine how pissed they were when American pharmaceutical companies then offered Fleming a $100,000 "gift of gratitude" and invited him to tour the nation at their expense in order to promote this new wonder drug -- just in time for a rash of venereal diseases that was infecting the country.

Thomas Edison Did Not Invent the Motion Picture Camera

Thomas Edison once said that genius is one percent inspiration, three percent perspiration, and ninety-six percent stealing other people’s ideas. I’m paraphrasing, but Edison, that master of self-promotion, is often erroneously credited with being the first person to ever create a working single-lens movie camera.

However, this was actually accomplished by a French inventor named Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, who is also credited with creating the first ever motion picture. In 1888, using a single-lens camera of his own design, Le Prince filmed his son playing a melodeon and dancing, then his in-laws shuffling in a Conga line, predating Edison's movie of a man sneezing by about six years and America’s Funniest Home Videos by over a century. In 1889, Le Prince then became the first person to ever project a motion picture, five years before the debut of Edison’s kinetoscope (which could only be viewed by one person at a time).

It’s possible that you haven’t heard of Le Prince because his un-American five-part name took up too much space in school textbooks (thanks again, Victor), but it may also be because he disappeared on a train shortly after demonstrating his invention in 1890… never to be heard from again. No big deal, just a murder mystery on a train in nineteenth century France. His body was never found, nor were his luggage or his papers. Edison then patented the movie camera shortly thereafter, taking full credit for its invention.

Le Prince’s family called bullshit and accused Edison of plotting his murder and stealing the ideas behind his invention. However, because he was never proven to be deceased, by law, even his wife could not commercialize his invention for seven years, a period which happened to overlap a pretty significant decade in the history of cinema. Meanwhile, the ensuing court battle lasted for thirty-four years and finally ended in a patent appeals court, when in 1930, Le Prince’s heirs posthumously earned him legal recognition as the inventor of the motion picture camera and projector, as well as his unofficial title as the "Father of Cinematography." This was one year before Edison died, but well after the Edison name had fully penetrated the annals of history.




Ferdinand Magellan Was Not the First Person to Circumnavigate the Globe

If you ever run into your history teacher from middle school, you can go ahead and explain to Ms. or Mr. Whatever that they were full of crap. You can tell them I said so. Although they were right to tell you that Ferdinand Magellan was indeed a Portuguese explorer whose ship circumnavigated the earth, Magellan himself died before their around-the-world adventure was complete. Sadly, just as his fortune cookie had predicted, he was killed by a spear when trying to convert a tribe in the Philippines to Christianity (in bed).

The only person who is known to have been with him for the entire journey was a Malay slave named Enrique de Malacca, who was Magellan’s personal servant and interpreter. Magellan had stated in his will that Enrique should be freed upon his death, but the crew kept him captive regardless. Enrique only escaped his shackles in a violent mutiny, so I guess getting credit for being the first person to go all the way around the world probably wasn’t real high on his list of priorities.

*A heavily edited version of this article appeared on Cracked.com on February 23, 2017, which also included two entries by another author. My original draft appears on this site as a potential "teaching opportunity."

As an added bonus, here are six more firsties who weren't really first:

Learn about America's true first President here...

...the first people to fly here...

...the first people to fly across the Atlantic here...

...the first person to break the sound barrier here...

...contenders for the first people to have reached the peak of Mount Everest here...

...and the real inventor of the radio here.

Psycho-Analysis

Every time Ill Douche opens his pursed mouth, whether to speak, breathe or sound out letters, I can't help but ask, "What the fuck is wrong with this guy?" So I decided to do some research. Then I got comfortable, settled in for some armchair psychoanalysis and came up with the following conclusions:

He is the Quintessential Baby Boomer

Baby Boomers are sometimes referred to as the "me" generation, and for many such individuals who were born between the end of the Second World War and the early 1960s (particularly those who were white, male and upper-class), it must have seemed as though they were inheriting a world made just for them.

For many of these newly-minted citizens of the burgeoning American empire, it was all about getting theirs now. In fact, collectively, this generation's self-absorption and lack of foresight are a large part of why we have many of the problems that we currently face, including the looming threat of environmental and economic disaster. Never mind future generations or those who weren't born with the same advantages. What's in it for me right now?

In 1946, little Donny Trump was born into a life of extreme privilege. He, his parents and four siblings lived in a 23-room house in Jamaica Estates, Queens. His father was worth an estimated $200 million at that time (about $2.7 billion adjusted for inflation) and the man was politically connected. To him, a million dollar loan really wasn't that big of a deal. Basically, Donny was an entitled little shit who grew up thinking that he could have anything that he wanted. It was just a matter of finding the right price.

"You mean if I tell people that I have lots of money, 
then one day I could even become President? Wow. 
I sure hope this country never gets any less great."

You know how they say that hard work builds character? Well, this is a kid who never had to work a day in his life, and one could certainly make the case that even as an adult, he never really has. His idea of work is negotiating, which in his mind means being a dick to get what you want. This might also have something to do with why he's so insecure about his hands. You see, his underdeveloped appendages have likely never had to do any physical labor of any kind, and without his inheritance, Donald J. Trump would be just like any other ignorant racist with a Twitter account, except he might actually have to break a sweat in order to earn an income. I suspect that the mere thought of having to make a living with those tiny, incapable hands terrifies him. Tyrannosaurus Rexes probably felt the same way. In fact, now that I think about it, the name of that particular dinosaur literally translates to "tyrant king." Coincidence? Probably.

Let's hope the handcuffs don't slide off. 

Either way, this man has never known anything outside of his own sense of entitlement and he has absolutely no ability to empathize with the lived experiences of most Americans, nor has he ever demonstrated any real desire to do so. At the same time, he wants ordinary Americans to love and adore him, while he couldn't give two shits about them, because that's how sociopaths roll. This man believes himself to be the center of the universe and will do whatever it takes to maintain that delusion.

Daddy Issues

When Trump was 13, his dad kicked him out of the house and sent him to military academy because little Donny was acting like a total fuck-up. That's right, the idle threat that has been used as a plot device in movies ranging from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure to Diary of a Wimpy Kid actually happened to this guy. His biographer described it as "a profound rejection of Donald." Frankly, after looking at all these pictures of him, I'm also starting to feel a profound rejection of Donald, and it tastes a lot like my lunch.

And what do you suppose happens to a kid whose own dad rejects him? Maybe he looks for anything he can find to boost his ego in order to fill this void. In this case, he becomes a narcissist who is obsessed with the idea of success and who constantly lies in order to get the attention that he so desperately desires. What? Too obvious?

A former classmate said that Donald was probably the most manipulative person he had ever met. Another described him as "a loudmouth bully," and Trump's music teacher from elementary school said of him, "When that kid was 10... even then he was a little shit."



The Failure of Theatre Leads to the Theatre of Failure

In 1970, Donald's first business venture was in helping to fund a Broadway play called Paris is Out, a comedy about an old married couple named Daniel and Hortense who plan to go to Europe. However, the trip is cancelled after Daniel complains that he has no interest in "Paris, Venice, shopping, sightseeing or speaking in French." Meanwhile, Hortense quietly longs to see more of the world.

As suggested by the title, the play is not about them going to Europe. Rather, it is about a guy convincing the woman he married thirty years ago that they should remain nationalistically isolated and ignorant to other cultures for the benefit of their marriage. In other words, it is about a selfish man who strongly believes in American exceptionalism, but only because of his own myopic frame of reference, which leaves him blind to all other human achievements.

The play was a flop and Trump never produced another Broadway show again. One can't help but wonder what would have happened if the play had been a success. It also makes me wonder: where is Sam from Quantum Leap when you need him?

"Ziggy says that there's a 98% probability that we are here to save this play --
and a two percent chance that the producers just wanted to see you in drag."

He is the Poster Child of Meaningless Celebrity

After his failure on Broadway, Trump turned his attention to the theatre of the absurd: spectacle for the sake of itself. Anything this man could do for attention, he almost certainly would. Whether that meant being interviewed on shock radio about his sex life, seeing his face in the tabloids, joining the cast of world wrestling, or hosting a "reality" tv show about a fake orange bag of douche who gets his kicks from firing people, there is nothing he wouldn't do in the name of self-promotion linked to the idea of success. He is famous for being rich and rich for being famous, a perfect postmodern loop. In fact, the Trump brand is really the only thing he has ever produced that is of any value... and even that he inherited.

I'm guessing "Mis-steaks" was already taken.

Of course, my guess is that it's only a matter of time before people retire that last name altogether in the same way that you don't see a lot of kindergarten teachers today with the surname of Hitler or Stalin. Hell, I don't even like playing euchre anymore because of the goddamn trump cards.

Just kidding. I never liked playing euchre.

He Believes Himself to be Superior to All Others

According to his biographer, Donald Trump really does believe himself to be a genius, someone who is genetically gifted in such ways as to make him objectively better than all other human beings. Trump is right, so everyone else must be wrong. This is the product of an extremely sheltered life. As suggested earlier, it is also the result of having one's ego destroyed as a teenager, then surrounding himself with sycophants, which led him to rebuild his ego as that of a sociopathic narcissist who convinced himself of his own greatness in order to dispel any reality that would seem to prove otherwise.

He looks different without the hairpiece.

Normal rules are for normal people, but he sees himself as something better than that, which is why he also believes himself to be above tax codes and constitutional law. These things may apply to mere mortals, but not this guy. He is the most special snowflake of all.

He Has No Friends

So it might seem strange that a man who thinks that he's god's gift to humanity wouldn't have any close friends, but even he admits this to be the case. For some reason, nobody wants to hang out with a rich, stupid asshole who thinks he's better than everybody else. Weird, right?

Friends keep us grounded. When we think about doing something stupid, it is our friends who offer perspective. Imagine living a whole life without anyone to tell you that what you are saying or doing is stupid. Instead, you've always been surrounded by business acquaintances, employees and yes men.

...and occasionally professional wrestlers.

Donald Trump looks in the mirror every day at his Oompa-Loompa complexion, piss-colored hair, and botoxed expression of testosterone-fueled stupidity and says, "Yeah, you deserve to be President because you're better than everybody else, and anybody who says otherwise is a big fat stupid liar!" Meanwhile, there is nobody around to say, "Actually, that's kind of stupid. Maybe you shouldn't think that."

If I fake-tanned and wore a ridiculous hairpiece, I'm pretty sure that I could count on my friends to give me shit about it. You see, having friends is kind of its own system of checks and balances, and without them, we can make some pretty horrible decisions.

At this point, I think that even people who voted for him are starting to "regert" it. 

Stick This in Your Hat and Call it Macaroni

In 1899, Guglielmo Marconi famously broadcast the morse code signal for the letter “s” -- presumably the interrupted beginning of “Shit just got real!” -- from Cornwall, England to a radio antenna in Newfoundland over two thousand miles away, disproving a commonly held theory that the curvature of the earth would prevent long distance wireless transmission. Not only did Marconi win that bet, but ten years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his work with radio waves. 

Be the douche.

The thing is, he was using somebody else’s invention. That somebody else was a scientist from India named Jagadish Chandra Bose, who had demonstrated his radio wave transmitting and receiving equipment at the Royal Institution in London two years prior. 

Marconi was actually living there at the time, and the two men are believed to have met. Otherwise, it would be even stranger that Marconi's device happened to have the exact same design as Bose's. Both men were also interviewed by McClure’s Magazine in March of 1897, during which Bose told the interviewer that he had no interest in making money off his invention. Marconi, however, had no such qualms. Ironically, a hundred and nineteen years later, Marconi's name sounds remarkably similar to one of the cheapest meals at the grocery store, and if you do a web search of “Bose” and “radio,” all you get is high-end consumer electronics. 

Marconi's name was actually popularized by the propaganda of Mussolini's fascist regime as a symbol of Italy's technological excellence. This was back in 1923, about ten years before fascism was widely considered to be an ugly word, right around the time that Benito Mussolini was first on the cover of Time magazine. 

To most Americans, fascism was just big business on steroids, and bigger business could only be better... until it wasn't. Mussolini was even the best man at Marconi's second wedding, and in 1935, Marconi is said to have attempted to demonstrate a Bond-villain-like "death ray" for Mussolini that could have later been used against the Allied forces. It was designed to incapacitate the engines of airplanes in flight. Had Marconi's experiments been successful, the war could have ended quite differently. 

It Can Happen Here

In 1935, American author Sinclair Lewis wrote a satirical novel called It Can't Happen Here about a fascist takeover in the United States. The story features a fictional politician named Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip who defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1936 election by running on a populist platform and promising to restore America's greatness.

Upon taking office, President Windrip immediately outlaws any form of public dissent and creates a militarized police force called the Minute Men to keep American citizens in line. After minimizing the influence of Congress and the Supreme Court, Windrip rules through executive actions, continually abusing his position of authority in order to gain more power. Meanwhile, Americans let it all happen because they bought into the myth that this self-serving charlatan would lead them to prosperity.

So you might think that this all sounds familiar. The thing is, so would a lot of Germans at that time. You see, Lewis drew inspiration for many of the plot elements of his novel from what had been happening in Germany since the end of World War I. As discussed in a previous article, their economy wasn't exactly doing too well. In fact, the deutschmark was pretty much worthless throughout most of the 1920s. The desperation that this caused led to a revitalized sense of nationalism as Germans vowed to make their country great again by whatever means necessary.

In 1925, Paul von Hindenburg was elected President of Germany on just such a platform. In order to restore Germany to the glory of its mythologized past, Hindenburg surrounded himself with a group of cronies who became known as the "Kamarilla," which included his son Oskar and a military advisor named General Kurt von Schleicher. With the help of the Kamarilla, Hindenburg was able to greatly expand his own power, including the time when he gave himself the authority to dissolve the German parliament, known as the Reichstag, with the intent of forming a new government more ideologically aligned with his own views. Hindenburg also granted himself the power to appoint a Chancellor. This person would effectively be the head of the government, overseeing all of its moving parts, while Hindenburg himself remained the head of state.

...and Hindenburg's mustache was named the 
official beer sponge of the Weimar Republic.

During Hindenburg's first seven-year term, the German economy saw little improvement. People were angry. Jewish bankers became scapegoats. A far-right nationalist movement developed within the fragments of their broken country. Meanwhile, an increasing number of Germans questioned why their government was still paying war reparations when their own people were starving. In ever-angrier voices (or maybe it just sounded that way because they were German), they asked, "Shouldn't their own country come first?" while people in brown shirts believed themselves to be inherently better than everyone else, particularly the "lesser citizens" among them.

Paul von Hindenburg successfully ran for reelection in 1932. At 84 years old, he only ran for public office again because he was seen by many as the only person who could beat the candidate from the Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP in German, Nazis to everybody else). Yes, that candidate was an up-and-coming political firebrand by the name of Adolph Hitler. Hindenburg took about 53% of the vote, compared to Hitler, who only received about 37%. However, while the Nazis did not have a majority in the Reichstag either, the remaining seats were split among the two other major parties, thereby giving the Nazis more overall influence in the legislature.

Hindenburg still got to pick the radio station.

Hindenburg was pressured by Nazis in the Reichstag to appoint Hitler as Chancellor, which he reluctantly did in January 1933. It is therefore accurate to say that Hitler was democratically elected, although technically, he was actually appointed to the position of Chancellor by the President. The following month, an arson set the Reichstag ablaze. A young Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe took the fall and was promptly arrested. His trial was sensationalized on national radio. Millions tuned in. They came for the drama but stayed for the propaganda. Van der Lubbe was of course found guilty, although some historians have suggested that Hermann Göring, founder of the Gestapo and President of the Reichstag at that time, was actually the one who started the fire. (Many years later, Billy Joel helped narrow down the list of suspects.)

Pictured: pure fucking evil.

In the immediate aftermath of the arson, the Reichstag temporarily met in the Kroll Opera House, where they passed the "Reichstag Fire Decree." This was kind of like the Patriot Act in that it suspended a number of civil liberties in the name of protecting people from these (anarchic communist) terrorists, which people were led to believe had infiltrated their communities. Only the big, strong government could protect them. In March, the Reichstag then passed the "Enabling Act," which granted the executive branch the power to make laws without the Reichstag. By essentially voting themselves obsolete, this was a major step toward establishing a true authoritarian government.

Hitler's power as Chancellor only continued to increase as more and more rights were stripped away from the German people. Millions of innocent people died, while millions more fled their homeland. When Paul von Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, Hitler appointed himself Führer, abandoning any last pretenses of democracy in favor of full autocratic rule. As Sinclair Lewis was keen to recognize, people tend to let dictators get away with their crimes in plain sight until their horrific actions are no longer considered criminal. All the while, people tell themselves that it can't happen here.

It is happening, and only we can stop it. Democracy and justice are the only viable remedies.

Resist fascism. Vote for a common good.

Spring Cleaning

As better weather steadily approaches, many of us will soon be cleaning out our basements and garages in order to purge our homes of anything for which we no longer have any practical use. We may donate these items, recycle them or throw them in the trash, depending on their perceived value and condition. Regardless of what something is though, if it sits unused, then it is just creating clutter, and only after these things are out of the way can we scrub away any of the grime and funk that may be lurking underneath.

I should note however that this is not an article about organizing and disinfecting one's home. If you want to live like a slob, that's on you. Rather, I would like to point out that American politics is in fact long overdue for some major spring cleaning. Our elected officials have been hoarding bad practices for so long that it is difficult to even find a functioning government beneath. Perhaps then it is time to reevaluate what we actually need and what we're just holding onto for old times' sake.

Here are six things that our current political system could do without:

Voting on Tuesday

Here in the US, unlike most other modern democracies, Election Day is not a national holiday. We also hold it on a day that seems both strangely specific and entirely arbitrary. This is because in 1845, Congress decided that Americans should all vote on the first Tuesday after the second Monday in November, but never during a 'witching moon,' whatever that is.

Ok, I made up that last part, but the rest of it is legit. Yes, sometimes it seems like our laws may have been written with the help of Mad Libs.

November was chosen as not to interfere with harvest season, as the United States was still primarily agrarian back then. This is the same reason we have Daylight Savings Time, which gets an honorable mention in this list in terms of useless cogs in our democracy. As for Tuesday, it allowed traveling time to and from people's homes to their polling stations, and it was the one day of the week with the fewest religious objections. This was also before bowling leagues were even a thing.

The odd specificity of the date itself was actually the result of an ill-conceived compromise between religion, business and politics -- which may explain why it's such a mess. Hey, did you hear the one about the priest, the businessman and the politician crafting one of the pillars of our democracy? It was a real joke, let me tell you.

You see, according to some sects of Christianity, November 1 is All Saints Day, and lawmakers wanted to eliminate the possibility of this conflicting with Election Day. Apparently they forgot about that whole separation of church and state thing. The beginning of the month is also when merchants did their books and politicians worried that if that month's economic reports reflected poorly, then it might cost them reelection.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why we vote on the first Tuesday after the second Monday in November, despite it being a day when working-class Americans are most likely to be working.

Actually, I suspect that voter suppression is exactly why the law has never been changed even though it makes absolutely zero sense in the context of a modern democracy. If we truly want to call ourselves a democracy in good conscience, then Election Day should be a national holiday and we should have federal standards for automatic registration and absentee voting so that everyone has a voice. There is no legitimate reason not to.

Gerrymandering

You know Gerry, right? Well let me tell you, this Gerry Mandering guy is a total asshole who has completely corrupted the democratic integrity of our political system. In fact, he is probably the number one reason why elected representatives today don't represent the interests of the people who elected them. I'll explain...

The term 'gerrymandering' actually comes from the name of Governor Elbridge Gerry, who in 1810 redrew the district lines for the Massachusetts state Senate race in order to give an advantage to his own political party. The Boston Gazette ran an article lampooning this practice, referring to it as "The Gerry-Mander" due to its perceived resemblance to a salamander, and because nineteenth century newspaper cartoonists were like that.

It was meant to inspire ridicule as a shameless manipulation of our democracy, but today, nearly all political district lines in the United States have been drawn by elected politicians or appointees of those politicians. Depending on which party was in power at the time, that district was almost certainly designed to favor one over the other, resulting in maps that look like this:

This also has the effect of making most Congressional districts non-competitive. Doesn't it seem strange that a Congress with an approval rating of 11% can also see a reelection rate of about 91%? This is because their districts were designed to be safe. Instead of voters choosing their representatives, the representatives are essentially choosing their voters, which generally means that they will win reelection whether they give two shits about their constituencies or not.

As a result, there is a very good chance that your elected representatives are far more interested in what lobbyists and campaign donors have to say than they are in the concerns of anyone who lives in the areas that they are supposed to represent. Basically, they don't listen to the people in their home districts because they don't have to. These pricks know that they'll probably get re-elected anyway.

It seems strange that people accept this as normal.

Filibustering

Ok. I don't know if Gerry and Phil are friends, but Phil's kind of a dick, too. Filibustering is kind of like pouring sand into the machinery of our democracy. It slows everything down to a stop, requiring a 60-vote 'supermajority' in the Senate to get the damn thing moving again. One might also compare it to a kid throwing a temper tantrum in the toy aisle at the store because he refuses to leave without getting what he wants... and that means that nobody's leaving.

Although filibustering is a practice that dates back as far as Ancient Rome, it has only been used in modern dysfunctional democracies like ours since the late nineteenth century. Yes, in the 1800s, it seems that the common practice was to use gerunds in the same way that journalists today just slap 'gate' at the end of any word to denote a scandal.

In 1939, Jimmy Stewart made filibustering cool in the climactic scene of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. What can I say? People had very different standards of coolness back then.

The filibuster really is more of a loophole than it is a sound legal practice, a form of legislative obstruction that has been exploited to sometimes ridiculous ends... like the time Strom Thurmond (also known as the "Racist who refused to die") spoke for over twenty-four hours straight in a vain attempt to prevent the Civil Rights Act of 1957 from passing. In every sense, that is the opposite of democracy in action.

Lobbyists

Let's say that I am a lobbyist who represents a major corporation -- but let's do this quickly, because I'm already starting to hate myself. In our hypothetical scenario, my company made a campaign contribution of an undisclosed denomination to an elected representative in return for face-time with this politician. This will give me, the lobbyist, an opportunity to tell the representative what he or she can do for our company now that we helped get this person re/elected. In fact, I may even have a bill that was written up at my firm for the elected official to sign and put to the floor for a vote...

This kind of thing happens all of the time. How is it not corruption? How is it that these dark campaign contributions are not considered bribery? Does anyone believe that these corporations are supporting specific political candidates out of the goodness of their hearts? Guess what. Corporations aren't people, and capitalism has never been motivated by human compassion. Corporations hire lobbyists to bribe politicians. Everybody knows that's how it works, but nobody does anything about it... because the people who are in the position to institute systemic change are the exact same people who benefit the most from this system, so why would they ever disrupt the status quo?

Lobbying is a way for corporations and special interest groups to make campaign donations in return for political favors, to make their voices heard over the millions of people that the politician is supposed to represent. Not only is this legal, but for some reason, most people accept it as an integral component of our political system. Corporate lobbying should be called out for what it is: a legalized form of blatant corruption.  

The Electoral College

In the original Constitution, the Electoral College actually made slightly more sense. According to Article II, Section 1, Clause 3, each elector was allowed two votes for President, but they could not use both of those votes on candidates from their home state. Whoever got the most votes would be President, and the second place winner would be Vice President. I think third place got a Frisbee. The Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1803, then changed this to the system that we have today. As discussed in a previous article, it was designed to create an artificial balance of power between the more populous northern states and the slave-owning southern states. In 2016, this was the same system that gave us Ill Douche.

In 1969, there was a vote to change to a system of popular vote, doing away with the Electoral College completely, but since that would have completely changed the political landscape in the US, those who were in power at the time voted it down. Once again, when people have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, to those individuals, change is seen as something that threatens to destroy rather than create. 

The Two-Party System

The US Constitution includes no mention of political parties, yet by requiring a majority of electors in order to win the Presidency, it essentially mandates that there can only be two major parties, because in a three-way split, no one would have a majority. In such a scenario, the President would be chosen by the House of Representatives. Personally, I would have more faith in the decision-making ability of a room full of monkeys, even if the only thing they ever voted for was more bananas.

Besides, it wouldn't be all bad. At least bananas don't want to build walls, start trade wars or destroy the multicultural foundation upon which this country was built. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for rotten oranges.

The two-party system is also responsible for the lesser-of-two-evils mentality that dominates contemporary American politics. Granted, I suppose a lesser-of-three-evils wouldn't be much better, but if we weren't limited by the current system, there is always the possibilty that voters might actually have some real options about how to move this country forward. They might even be able to find honest politicians who are willing to fight on behalf of their interests for a change. 

Isn't that how it's supposed to work? And since anyone who is paying attention can clearly see that it doesn't, then don't you think maybe it's time to clean things up a bit? All this clutter is clogging the machinery of our democracy. Remember: the first three words of our Constitution are We the People, and the idea was to have a system of government that could adapt with the changing times, ever in pursuit of "a more perfect union."