b) A state where anyone can buy for cash (or lay - away installment plan) one or more franchises, and this is the government's sole source of income other than services sold competitively and non - monopolistically. This would produce a new type of government with several rabbits tucked away in the hat. Rich people would take over the government? Would they, now? Is a wealthy man going to impoverish himself for the privilege of casting a couple of hundred votes? Buying an election today, under the warm - body (and tombstone) system is much cheaper than buying a controlling number of franchises would be. The arithmetic on this one becomes unsolvable... but I suspect that paying a stiff price (call it 20,000 Swiss francs) for a franchise would be even less popular than serving two years.
c) A state that required a bare minimum of intelligence and education - e.g., step into the polling booth and find that the computer has generated a new quadratic equation just for you. Solve it, the computer unlocks the voting machine, you vote. But get a wrong answer and the voting machine fails to unlock, a loud bell sounds, a red light goes on over that booth - and you slink out, face red, you having just proved yourself too stupid and/or ignorant to take part in the decisions of the grownups. Better luck next election! No lower age limit in this system - smart 12 - yr - old girls vote every election while some of their mothers - and fathers - decline to be humiliated twice.
There are endless variations on this one. Here are two:
Improving the Breed - No red light, no bell.. . but the booth opens automatically - empty. Revenue - You don't risk your life, just some geld. It costs you a 1/4 oz troy of gold in local currency to enter the booth. Solve your quadratic and vote, and you get your money back. Flunk - and the state keeps it. With this one I guarantee that no one would vote who was not interested and would be most unlikely to vote if unsure of his ability to get that hundred bucks back.
I concede that I set the standards on both I.Q. and schooling too low in calling only for the solution of a quadratic since (if the programming limits the machine to integer roots) a person who deals with figures at all can solve that one with both hands behind him (her) and her/his eyes closed. But I just recently discovered that a person can graduate from high school in Santa Cruz with a straight - A record, be about to enter the University of California on a scholarship.. . but be totally unable to do simple arithmetic. Let's not make things too difficult at the transition.
d) I don't insist on any particular method of achieving a responsible electorate; I just think that we need to tighten up the present warm - body criterion before it destroys us. How about this? For almost a century and a half women were not allowed to vote. For the past sixty years they have voted.. . but we have not seen the enormous improvement in government that the suffragettes promised us.
Perhaps we did not go far enough. Perhaps men are still corrupting government... so let's try the next century and a half with males disenfranchised. (Fair is fair. My mother was past forty before she was permitted to vote.) But let's not stop there; at present men outnumber women in elective offices, on the bench, and in the legal profession by a proportion that is scandalous.
Make males ineligible to hold elective office, or to serve in the judiciary, elective or appointed, and also reserve the profession of law for women.
Impossible? That was exactly the situation the year I was born, but male instead of female, even in the few states that had female suffrage before the XIXth Amendment, with so few exceptions as to be unnoticed. As for rooting male lawyers out of their cozy niches, this would give us a pool of unskilled manual laborers - and laborers are very hard to hire these days; I've been trying to hire one at any wages he wants for the past three months, with no success.
The really good ones could stay on as law clerks to our present female lawyers, who will be overworked for a while. But not for long. Can you imagine female judges (with no male judges to reverse them) permitting attorneys to take six weeks to pick a jury? Or allowing a trial to ramble along for months?
Women are more practical than men. Biology forces it on them.
Speaking of that, let's go whole hog. Until a female bears a child her socio - economic function is male no matter how orthodox her sexual preference. But a woman who is mother to a child knows she has a stake in the future. So let's limit the franchise and eligibility for office and the practice of law to mothers.
The phasing over should be made gentle. Let males serve out their terms but not succeed themselves. V.! ale lawyers might be given as long as four years to retire or find other jobs while not admitting any more males into law schools. I don't have a candidate for President but the events of the last fifty years prove that anybody can sit in the Oval Office; it's just that some are more impressive in appearance than others.
Brethren and Sisters, have you ever stopped to think that there has not been one rational decision out of the Oval Office for fifty years?
An all - female government could not possibly be worse than what we have been enduring. Let's try it!
"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
- Thomas Jefferson - 1800 A.D.
FOREWORD
After I got STARSHIP TROOPERS out of the way, I indulged in some stone masonry (my favorite recreation and reconditioning after writing when I was younger), installed a fountain in our lower irrigation pool and landscaped it - then got back to work on THE HERETIC aka STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, and finally finished it more than ten years after I had plotted it. I had been in no hurry to finish it, as that story could not be published commercially until the public mores changed. I could see them changing and it turned out that I had timed it right.
Many people have said that it is clear that STRANGER was written in two parts; the division point showed. But no two people have ever picked the same putative division point... and this is the first time I have ever admitted that it was not written in two chunks but in four.
No one ever will spot the actual starts and stops because STRANGER is one of the very few stories in which I plotted every detail before writing it, and then stuck precisely to that plot. What readers pick as places where I "must have" broken the writing are in fact division points planned for dramatic reasons.
Then I had to cut the damned thing; sticking to that complex and ponderous plot resulted in a MS more than twice as long as it should have been, either commercially or dramatically. Cutting it took more working time than writing it.
In the meantime my wife signed up for University of Colorado Extension classes in Russian. She has always believed that anything worth doing at all is worth overdoing; for two solid years she lived and breathed Russian. She never missed a class, was always thoroughly prepared, hired a private conversation tutor to supplement her classroom work, bought every brand of Russian language instruction records available then, kept them stacked on the record changer and played them all day long while she did other things - our home had a speaker in every room, and a large speaker for the garden.
(This did not bother my work; since I knew no Russian then, it was random noise to me.)
Two years of this and she could read Russian, write Russian, speak Russian, understand Russian - and think in Russian.
Then we went to the USSR.
Other countries, too, of course - Poland and Czechoslovakia won my undying sympathy, as well as the captive Baltic states. I should include the Turkistan countries, too, but they don't seem quite as oppressed - much farther from Moskva and off the beaten track. All in all we traveled about 10,000 miles inside USSR and saw about twenty cities. Ginny's hard work paid off; we saw and heard far, far more than we could have learned had we been dependent on a politically - cleared guide - we often ducked out without our guide. I picked up some pidgin Russian but never learned to speak it - I could give directions, ask directions, order a meal, pay a bill - and swear in Russian (essential!).