Election Year 2000
by Jim Farrar (1975)
The results of the election are in. I can see that very clearly. But something seems to be different. The man who received all the votes is acting very upset. He is saying that he doesn’t deserve to leave office yet. He says he is still young and idealistic about what this country can accomplish and where it can go. While he is talking, the people to whom the young man is speaking are getting more and more irrate, they are telling what seems to be his entourage to hurry up and get it over with because they don’t like to view vile acts in public.
Can this be an inauguration!? No. Wait a minute, it isn’t! What appears to be in an election is actually what you might call a “de-election.” These people have just disposed of their president, they’ve actually voted him out of office. My God, they’ve reversed the system! Instead of getting a new man in office every four years, they’re putting one out. Democracy turned upside down you might say. What banal intellect could‘ve come up with this!?
There’s more activity in the forum now. Have they just chosen a successor? No! They haven’t! The man who has just been voted out of office has been tied to a stake in the middle of the forum. Somebody is spreading what appears to be gasoline at the base of the stake. Oh my God! They’ve just lit the gasoline! They’re going to burn their ex-president. What has caused this reversion back to primitive tactics?! A society where the leader is taken out of office, by order of the people, and destroyed? What happened? Why?!
The people are filing out of the forum now. Their faces so stoic and somber that they look like they have been painted on by an artist who knows the future. One man turns to another and asks blandly, “I wonder who they’ll get next?”