A rambling dicourse with a couple of points
Part I
The college I attended was a relatively young school at twelve years of age. Thus, it lacked in the kind of traditions that are established with time at, oh, say your Ivy League schools or for that matter some of the established Universities in California like UCLA or Berkley.
By virtue of being a new institution, opportunity for a neoteric thinking, by definition, afforded itself to the non-generation that we represented - too old to be "baby boomers" and too young to be so-called "generation-X".
Further freedoms emerge when not constrained by a stereotype and that, my four or five loyal readers, is exactly what happened in Orange County, California, in 1976 at the University of California at Irvine. The irony of the situation is well worth pointing out as well.
In 1976 Orange County boasted about a 75% republican party advantage. (Sorry, this is from my recollection. I couldn't find historical data of partisanship this far back) Even today In Orange County there are over 200,000 more registered Republicans than there are registered Democrats. But I'm quick to point out that this was 25+ years ago and at that time, Orange County was a conservative hotbed.
Coalescing everything written to this point in the story, UCI was, in those days, a tinderbox waiting for a spark. The atmosphere was one of political apathy. Students were more interested in getting a degree and making some money - a genre that continues even now. We weren't blind, though, to the history of the sixties, we simply didn't have a cause. Of course in those days, UCI was one institution still revered for free partisan discourse. There weren't "areas of designated free speech." Didn't need them. You were free to set up a soapbox when and wherever. The point is no one did....
That was to change. Early in the school-year, the powers that were decided that the school needed a mascot for our respectively diminutive sports program. Ballots were sent out to students with the usual banal candidate representatives. I don't remember what they were exactly. I only remember that they were lackluster (Centurions, Matadors, like that). And that's when it happened - spontaneously - as all good times usually do. The tenets of "mascotism" were suddenly the mysterious subject of an undercurrent. As if to try and expiate the general apathy of our generation, a gauntlet was thrown down. The conservative, gentrified and wholly establishment-submissive university masses suddenly and collectively had an epiphany - an apostany of apercus. The mascot would be our cause - such as it was. Now I know some of you are thinking "Phewf". "That doesn't compare to the issues that we fought for or against in the sixties." To which I reply, "You're damn right!" There simply wasn't anything else available at the time. Every generation defines itself by the issues of their "day and age". Quite frankly, the seventies were a pretty boring decade by such standards. But we were about to fight for our own identity in now, what I realize was a ridiculous but none the less compelling way.
To the recriminate consternation of university officials, UCI did adopt, by a 97% write-in vote a mascot of epic proportions then and for ever more - the anteater.
In an insitution that, at the time, promoted democratic and meaningful intercourse, there wasn't much the administration could do but to acquiesce. Small miracles happen in the subtlest ways.
Well my four or five ardent readers, I am assuredly ashamed to bring you:
Part II
I kid you not Homer Simpson leads the on-line non scientific poll for the greatest American ever.
I intentionally tied it in with Part I because I would hope that y'all in the hereabouts would see the irony in this flagrant display of ridiculous on-line polling. Sure it's the BBC but isn't this a blatant comment about how even a country that is supposedly our ally (au courant) views America and off-handily implicit, it's administration? I realize that England/Britain has roughly the same population of "telephile rubber people" as does the USA per capita and I hope that the same poll results wouldn't occur here... but would they? How many people would elect Homer above Bush?
My main point to all of this is that simply a minority motivated by a simple meme can overcome the "incumbent" which I previously referred to as the "administration" and that so-called non-scientific polls don't really reflect the whole of Americana. A lesson to be learned born of a reality of history and witnessed by me up close and personal.
7:11:19 PM 
Welcome To The Club
