back to basics

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D E C E M B E R 1 9 9
8

Easy-to-understand measures that could bring palpable
improvement to public life

by Cullen Murphy

"A REFORMER," New York City's corrupt mayor Jimmy
Walker once observed, "is a guy who rides through a
sewer in
a glass-bottomed boat." Americans these days
understandably
regard politics and politicians with dismay, even
contempt, but
the counterweight on the scales of public opinion is a
well-earned suspicion of reformers and reform. Poets
and
philosophers down the years have issued sober warnings
on
the subject. Coleridge's observation is typical:
"Every reform,
however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an
excess, that itself will need reforming."

A realist could hardly disagree. And yet it must also
be
admitted that one of the chief drawbacks of
present-day efforts
at reform has simply been their complexity. In ancient
times
what we now might think of as "regulatory oversight"
tended to
be expressed with peremptory concision: "Tell the
Israelites:
anyone, whether an Israelite or an alien residing in
Israel, who
gives any of his offspring to Molech, shall be put to
death."
Today, to cite but one example, the full text of the
laws and
regulations covering the conduct of federal election
campaigns
-- reforms dating back to the 1970s, and widely known
to be
inadequate -- fills a dozen official volumes.
Discuss this article in
Post & Riposte.

Calls for political reform are once more in the air.
In response,
we might experiment with simplicity. Consider the
following:

The No-Fly Zone. Modern Presidents almost never travel
long distances in America by surface transportation,
preferring
the efficiency and glamour of Air Force One. However,
on the
rare occasions when they do undertake journeys by
train or
bus, the effect along the route is one of authentic
popular
expectation. Knots of ordinary people sit fanning
themselves in
lawn chairs, the paint still sticky on their handmade
signs. This
is how it always used to be: see the accounts in books
like
Washington's Southern Tour, 1791 and North for Union:
John Appleton's Journal of a Tour to New England Made
by President Polk in June and July 1847. Franklin D.
Roosevelt traveled some 544,000 miles by rail during
his
twelve years in office, stopping at Nowheresvilles
along the
way and maintaining a leisurely daytime touring speed
of no
more than thirty-five miles an hour. A modern
President may
cover that distance by plane in a couple of years,
encountering
planted crowds at airports and moneyed ones in hotel
ballrooms, and seeing essentially nothing.

So why not declare the continental United States to be
a no-fly
zone for the President? Indeed, a prohibition on
domestic air
travel ought to cover aspirants to the presidency as
well.
Establishing a no-fly zone would restore some of the
populist
aura of a medieval ruler's progress through the realm
-- in this
case, a realm whose terrestrial vastness and
loneliness are
essential elements of its character.

The Stamp Act. Concerned citizens wring their hands
over
our venal system of campaign financing, and over our
apparent
inability to implement reforms that don't contain
fresh
loopholes. What if we stopped worrying about the size
of
campaign war chests and instead started stipulating
how the
money had to be spent? Imagine, for instance, that
candidates
could raise as much money as they wished, from
whomever
they pleased, through whatever methods they might
devise --
but were allowed by law to communicate with voters
only by
means of words written on paper and carried through
the mails.

In 1995-1996 candidates for national office spent
hundreds of
millions of dollars to buy radio and television time
for
advertising. Directing that sum away from the airwaves
and into
the printed word would have far-reaching and
beneficent
consequences. For one thing, the U.S. Postal Service
would be
bound to improve. More important, so would the quality
of
public discourse: committing thoughts to writing
almost
inevitably has an uplifting effect on communication.
Moreover,
illiteracy would gradually disappear, as political
leaders across
the nation, competing for literate voters, began
spending huge
sums on "party-building activities" -- like running
good schools.
Even Republicans might perceive the wisdom of teaching
the
native-born children of illegal aliens how to read.

The Thingvellir Protocol. In a year or two Iceland
will
celebrate the millennium of its conversion to
Christianity, and
we will therefore soon be hearing a great deal, or at
least a
certain amount, about Iceland's contributions to
Western
civilization. Iceland's parliament, the Althing, came
into
existence more than a thousand years ago, and is
widely
acknowledged to be Europe's oldest legislative body.
The
Althing was ahead of its time in one other important
respect: it
was empowered to keep no more laws on the books than
the
presiding speaker could commit to memory. The rule was
enforced every year by means of a public recitation by
the
speaker upon the Law Rock, a lava promontory
overlooking
the plains of Thingvellir.

This procedure, and the limitations it implies, hold
great appeal.
Modern America represents, of course, an advanced
technological society, and it would be simplistic to
adopt the
Thingvellir Protocol without some modification: we
really do
need more laws than did tenth-century Iceland. An
updated
version of the protocol would permit the speaker of
the House
to supplement his memory with that of one other person
--
maybe the House minority leader. (Alternatively, my
wife
suggests the person occupying the center space on
Hollywood
Squares.)

The "Natural-Born" Exclusion. Article II, Section 1,
of the
United States Constitution restricts the presidency to
natural-born citizens of the United States -- the very
people
who have so often fallen short in our political life.
One
refinement that we ought to consider is deletion from
the
eligibility clause of the words "person except a
natural born"
after the word "no." The provision would thus
stipulate that "no
[...] Citizen" shall henceforward "be eligible to the
Office of
President" -- thereby putting the White House
exclusively in the
hands of non-Americans. This measure may strike some
as
bizarre, but it finds powerful precedent in the
practice of many
Italian city-states during the Renaissance: they
placed executive
authority in the hands of a podest; who by law was
selected
from outside the commune. The rationale was
compelling. As
one chronicler of twelfth-century Genoa observed,
outsiders
could assume the mantle of power without stirring up
"civil
discords and hateful conspiracies and divisions."
Outsiders
would lack corrupting ties to local economic,
political, and
familial interests, and also the slight whiff of
disrepute that
lingers even among the honorable after a long career
in one
community's public life.

Would we still hear complaints about a lack of
candidates with
"stature," or an absence of "choice," if instead of
American
citizens we had Tony Blair, Gro Brundtland, Nelson
Mandela,
Kim Dae Jung, and Mary Robinson to pick from? Not
likely.
Nor would we be hearing about troubling ties to Big
Tobacco
or Big Poultry. At the same time, making this
electoral regime
reciprocal -- that is, offering our ineligible
native-born
candidates to foreign lands -- would give the idea of
"exporting
democracy" a whole new meaning. Analysts frequently
bemoan
the fractious ethnicity and anemic democratic
traditions in many
struggling young countries. What better solution than
the
creation of an international podesteria, which could
provide a
Jesse Jackson or an Elizabeth Dole, a Mario Cuomo or a
Steve Forbes, to serve as chief executive in Belgrade,
Kabul,
or Kinshasa?

The Screen Test. Finally, we could bring much-needed
stability to the Executive Office of the President by
making
some basic decisions, as a people, about who is going
to hold
the job of President in the movies. Foreign audiences,
judging
us by our film output, must think we go through
leaders with the
impatience of Rome under the Praetorians. A partial
list of
those who have served as movie President during the
past
decade would include Harrison Ford, Michael Douglas,
Bill
Pullman, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, Donald Moffat,
Nigel Hawthorne, Stanley Anderson, Jim Curley, Kevin
Kline,
and Anthony Hopkins. Jack Lemmon and James Garner have
depicted ex-Presidents. Glenn Close and Ben Kingsley
have
served as Vice President. John Travolta has run for
the nation's
highest office.

On Election Day we should vote not only for a
President but
also for an actor or actress to play the movie role of
President
for the next four years -- the projected winner, one
might say.
The victorious candidate would assume all cinematic
Oval
Office duties during the coming term -- but, of
course, he or
she would have to forswear all other movie and
television roles,
not to mention commercials.

My own preference would be for Morgan Freeman. He is a
man of immense personal dignity who can boast military
experience (Glory) and who has already done his prison
time
(The Shawshank Redemption). I'll look forward to
seeing him
in Amtrak One.

Cullen Murphy is The Atlantic's managing editor. His
latest
book is The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible
in Ancient Times and Our Own (1998).

Copyright 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All
rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; December 1998; Back to Basics;
Volume 282, No. 6; pages 26 - 28.

"I think I got the monkey Robert Fernandez
but I haven't tried it yet." rfer...@chuma.cas.usf.edu
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