Back in college, when we were all oh-so-earnest-and-deep, a friend threw out a question to a group of us gathered at a coffee shop.
"Who would you vote for," he said, fingers tented pompously, "if your only choice was between an evil man and a stupid man? And why?"
Of course, the first answer was "Mickey Mouse" followed by the perennial candidate, Pat Paulson, as well as Howard the Duck, who was running that year as well, as I recall. But John eschewed these choices, insisting that write-in votes weren't allowable and only these two candidates, the evil and the stupid, could be voted for. "And you must vote," he intoned gravely, "you cannot abstain. So which do you choose?"
There was a long silence. I wasn't about to open my mouth at that point. I had dated John and knew the bear traps he liked to set out in these little questions of his. But Cathy was game.
"I guess I'd have to vote for the stupid man," she said, after thinking for awhile. "He's not evil, at least, and he'll have people around him who can tell him when he's being really stupid. I mean, nobody governs all alone, do they?"
Everyone else just looked at each other. We weren't sure this was the "right" answer, but nobody was willing to go out on a limb and say so.
John waited for a few minutes and then sighed, dismissing us all as really hopeless. "Think about it," he said to Cathy, "who picks the 'people around him'? We don't elect them. He chooses them. And he's stupid."
Then he looked around at the rest of us, pityingly. "You'd have to choose the evil man, because self-preservation would limit the amount of damage he'd do to the country. The stupid man? He wouldn't know when or where to stop and the damage could be untold. Never vote for the stupid man. Never."
We assured him, and ourselves, that of course we wouldn't. Of course, this was long ago, when Jimmy Carter was still running for office. We had no idea that, 26 years later, we'd be stuck with the stupid man, whether we voted for him or not.
Isn't life strange sometimes?
5:50:21 PM 
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