
Peter EspeutI AM spending this week with relatives in Sacramento, the capital of the US state of California. My cousin's husband, Martin Owens Jr., calls himself a betrayed Republican, and a long-time before the impasse in Florida. Like many of us in Jamaica, he believes that politics has failed those it was created to serve.
Marty, an ex-lawyer, is a rabid disciple of H.L. Mencken, a now legendary US newspaper commentator and journalist of the last generation, and he has drawn to my attention a piece Mencken wrote in 1927 entitled, 'A Purge for Legislatures'. In this eerily prophetic essay, Mencken postulated the breakdown of the democratic process altogether in the USA, and he proposed an interesting alternative. This is what he said:
"A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned, and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against their will, instead of by fraud and against the will of all the rest of us, as now. But isn't the jury system itself imperfect? Isn't it occasionally disgraced by gross abuse and scandal? It has its failures and its absurdities, its abuses and its corruptions, but taking one day with another it manifestly works.
"So I propose that our Legislatures be chosen as our juries are now chosen that the names of all the men eligible in each assembly district be put into a hat, (or if no hat can be found that is large enough, into a bathtub), and that a blind moron, preferably of tender years, be delegated to draw out one. Let the constituted catchpolls then proceed swiftly to this man's house and take him before he can get away...
"The advantages that this system would offer are so vast and so obvious that I hesitate to venture into the banality of rehearsing them. It would, in the first place, save the commonwealth the present excessive cost of elections, and make political campaigns unnecessary. It would in the second place, get rid of all the heart-burnings that now flow out of every contest at the polls and block the reprisals and charges of fraud that now issue from the heart-burnings. It would, in the third place, fill all the State Legislatures with men of a peculiar and unprecedented caste of mind men actually convinced that public service is a public burden, and not merely a private snap.
Gangs of lawyers
And it would, in the fourth and most important place, completely dispose of the present degrading knee-bending and trading in votes, for nine-tenths of the legislators, having got into office unwillingly, would be eager only to finish their duties and go home, and even those who acquired a taste for the life would be unable to do anything to increase the probability, even by one chance in a million, of their re-election.
"The disadvantages of the plan are very few, and most of them, I believe, yield readily to analysis. Do I hear arguments that a miscellaneous gang of tin-roofers, delicatessen dealers and retired bookkeepers, chosen by hazard, would lack the vast knowledge of public affairs needed by makers of laws? Then I can only answer (a) that no such knowledge is actually necessary, and (b) that few, if any, of the existing legislators possess it. The great majority of public problems, indeed, are quite simple, and any man may be trusted to grasp their elements in ten days who may be and is trusted to unravel the obfuscations of two gangs of lawyers in the same time. In this department the so-called expertness of the so-called experts is largely imaginary. My scheme would have the capital merit of barring them from the game. They would lose their present enormous advantages as a class, and so their class would tend to disappear.
"Would that be a disservice to the state? Certainly not. On the contrary, it would be a service of the first magnitude, for the worst curse of democracy, as we suffer under it today, is that it makes public office a monopoly of a palpably inferior and ignoble group of men. They have to abase themselves in order to get it, and they have to keep on abasing themselves in order to hold it. The fact reflects itself in their general character, which is obviously low. They are men congenitally capable of cringing and dishonourable acts, else they would not have got into public life at all. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule among them, but how many?What I contend is that choosing legislators from that population, by chance, would reduce immensely the proportion of such slimy men in the halls of legislation, and that the effects would be instantly visible in a great improvement in the justice and reasonableness of the laws.
"Are juries ignorant? Then they are still intelligent enough to be trusted with your life and mine. Are they venal? Then they are still honest enough to take our fortunes into their hands. Such is the fundamental law and it has worked for nearly a thousand years..."
Mencken writing in 1927 called for an end to the class of professional politicians and the attendant corruption and debasement in public life which, he believes, follows. Is his proposed solution an option which needs to be taken seriously here in Jamaica?
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and is executive director of an environment and development NGO.