================================================================= Stuck In Traffic "Current Events, Cultural Phenomena, True Stories" Issue #23 - February, 1997 Contents: Can't Stop The Tide Campaign finance reform is a hot topic in Washington these days, but will any of the current proposals work? Probably not. All the current proposals are doomed to failure because they focus on the money instead of the power that attracts the money. It's The Story, Not The Glitz The marketers promoting the "special edition" of the Star Wars trilogy have failed to realize what makes Star Wars worth seeing again after 20 years. ==================================== Current Events You Can't Stop The Tide The latest fashion in political scandal is exposing to public view the unseemly contributors to the campaigns on one's political opponents. Not only is a candidate for office supposed to serve as role model to the world in terms of his public and personal conduct, not only is a candidate supposed to hold himself to a higher standard, candidates are now responsible for the moral character and conduct of contributors to their campaign. It is guilt by association to the highest degree. So, for example, if you accept a large campaign contribution from a guy who later turns out to have been an arms dealer who sells arms to your country's enemies, you are supposed to have known this and refused to accept the contribution. It's a noble goal and certainly one that is feasible up to a certain extent. If you are going to accept millions of dollars from a particular organization, it would only be prudent to know who you're "getting in bed with" before you accept the money. But in the heat of a political campaign, where contributions are flowing in from thousands of sources, it's impossible to perform a background check on every single contributor. There's just no time, especially with small contributions. Since a political campaign organization can never fully investigate the background of every contributor, there's always going to be cases where a candidate accepts money from people and organizations with whom he'd rather not be associated. And it's nearly impossible for a candidate to distance himself from an unseemly contributor after the money has been accepted. The only thing the candidate can say to the public is, "Hey, I had no idea this contributor was an arms dealer, a child molester, and a tax cheat. If I had known, I wouldn't have accepted a single penny from him." To which his political opponents can simply respond, "But you should have known." And the candidate's reputation is tarnished in the eyes of the public. The bottom line is that campaign finances make for very easy mud slinging. So Washington's all in a tizzy these days about something called "Campaign Finance Reform." Getting Back To That `Vision' Thing Americans have a tremendous capacity for idealism, especially when it comes to political institutions. It shapes our expectations about what government should be and how it should operate. One of the most fundamental of our idealistic expectations of government is that the voices of each individual citizen, simple and humble though he may be, are plugged directly in to the decision making process in Washington. We want our elected representatives to shape their policy and make their decisions based solely on what their individual constituents want. It's OK then, for a politician to accept a contribution from the Average American Family. It's OK to accept contributions from Mom and Pop's Grocery Store, since they are a small business employing regular folks in the district. What's not OK, it seems, is for people to aggregate their money in political action committees and contribute to political campaigns from PACs. What's not OK, according to our idealistic vision of government, is for a politician to accept money from contributors outside his district. The public sees this as being "bought out". These activities represent an interference in the communication between the politician and those who elect him. Most of the "Campaign Finance Reforms" being proposed are attempts at removing these interferences, but most cause as many problems as they are hoping to solve. Limiting The Size Of Contributions The traditional approach to campaign finance reform in the past has been to limit the size of political contributions, both from individuals and corporations. The exact limits vary depending on whether the political campaign is a federal or state campaign and depending on whether the contributor is an organization or an individual. But usually the limit is somewhere between one thousand and four thousand dollars. These limits are already on the books, well institutionalized in law, and well understood. Yet there is still a perception that politicians are being bought out with million dollar contributions. How can this be? Usually it's because large contributors find ways around the limits by filtering their contributions through multiple "middlemen." Sometimes this filtering is very blatant and direct, like the case where large contributors from the Pacific Rim filtered campaign contributions to the Clinton campaign through members of Buddhists temples in California. Sometimes the filtering is more subtle. Sometimes it's not a matter money laundering, but simple collusion. A large PAC or organization can simply decide which candidate to support and then each of the constituent members of the organization dutifully, but independently make the maximum contribution they are allowed. Money doesn't actually flow through the organization, it's more like a cartel where individual members trust each other to abide by the decision of the group. It's very difficult, perhaps impossible, to stop this sort of collusion. But some reformers are proposing even lower limits to campaign contributions anyway. It's like the king, who upon hearing that all his horses and all his men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again, told his court, "that just says to me that I need more horses and more men." Campaign contribution limits are flawed in concept, not in degree. Furthermore, lowering the campaign contribution limits any further would begin to affect grassroots politicians who really do raise their money in small contributions. While the grassroots politician is still going to get most of his contributions in increments under a hundred dollars, there are going to be a few individuals willing to contribute up to current limits. If these limits are lowered, the grassroots candidate is going to suffer. And the grass roots candidate is not going to be able to set up money filtering schemes with his small budget. But organizations that want to pump millions of dollars into a campaign have the incentive to invest in ways to circumvent the limits. So it's likely that lowering contribution limits any further would actually hurt the grass roots candidate more than they would hurt the candidates that depend on PACs and big organizations. Limiting The Origins Of Contributions Another approach to Campaign Finance Reform being proposed is to limit contributions to a candidate's campaign to individuals that live in the candidate's district. Obviously this is an unpopular proposal among politicians whose districts do not represent a very high concentration of wealth. Poorer districts will have less vigorous campaigns. Wealthier districts will receive all the attention from PACs and other large contributors. You can bet there is a lot more money dedicated to PACs and campaigning in New York City than there is in the deserts of Nevada. So trying to restrict contributions by geography puts some politicians at a disadvantage to others and doesn't solve the fundamental problem. And more importantly, limiting contributions by geography is a clear violation of free speech protection guaranteed by the Constitution because elected officials often make policy decisions that affect more people than just those in their district. For example, Jesse Helms is the ranking Senator from North Carolina, but as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he makes decisions that affect the entire country every day. Suppose you didn't approve of Helms' advocated policy with regard to Cuba. Shouldn't you be allowed to contribute to his opponent's campaign even though you don't live in North Carolina? Elimination of Soft Money The so called "soft money" concept is one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on the American people. The scam works like this. In order to avoid appearances of impropriety, PACs and other large organizations do not contribute directly to an individual candidate. Instead, they contribute to the candidate's political party. Contributions to political parties are called "soft money" because they are, by law, not spent on individual candidates but on the party's business. In other words, they are contributions to the ideals and agenda. But the Democrats and Republicans have shown over and over again that their principles and agenda are as much for sale as individual politicians are. A PAC is not going to contribute a large amount of soft money unless it has some assurance, perhaps only informally, that the money will be spent in a manner that favors the candidates that it supports. So, for example, the Democratic party can run television commercials selling the voters in a particular district on the merits of a tax increase and indirectly support the Democratic candidate in that district who is running on a platform that calls for tax increases. The problem with the soft money approach is that it removes the appearance that the candidate has sold out to a PAC, but at the same time it increases the candidate's obligation to the leaders of the party and it's political machine. The candidate's incentive is to suck up to the party machinery rather than to represent the people in his district. But since "soft money" is perfectly legal, the candidate can claim to have not "sold out." So some reformers have proposed "the total elimination of soft money." But this proposal has even thornier free speech implications. Since the whole idea behind a political party, in theory anyway, is to serve as a focus point for representing principles in public debate and putting those principles into action. Any limitation on political party contributions would be a limitation on entering the "marketplace of ideas" and participating in public debate. Public Financing Of Campaigns Of all the campaign finance reforms being proposed, public campaign financing is the most fundamentally flawed and the most short sighted. The idea is that since it costs so much money to run an election campaign, politicians are "forced" to accept contributions from PACs and other big dollar organizations because out of necessity. So if the candidates are allowed to spend taxpayer money for their campaigns, they won't sell themselves to the highest bidder. The first problem with this scheme is that there's nothing to stop a politician from tapping into both the public treasury and contributions from others. And since the politicians themselves control the spending, it would be like giving them a blank check to do whatever they want with tax payers' money. And giving them a blank check to spend on their campaigns would be even further complicated by the fact that they are also the ones that will decide who qualifies for tax payer funds. You can bet your bottom dollar that the rules for "qualifying" for tax payer funding of a campaign will favor the incumbents in a race, since the incumbents will be the ones writing the rules. So public financing has a huge potential to stifle competition in elections rather than increase it. But even if politicians had hearts of gold, even if their reputations were above reproach, financing election campaigns with tax payer money would still be a bad idea because it totally destroys one of the fundamental checks on power in our government. It removes the accountability politicians have to the people who elect them. The accountability an elected official has toward his constituents comes not just from the fact that they cast votes for him, but from the fact that his constituents support him during the campaign. If a candidate for office, did not have to raise money from his constituents, campaigns would degenerate into competitions about which candidate will get the government to spend the most on the district. Under public financing of campaigns, votes will be bought instead of earned. Fixing The Problem In order to effectively reform how campaigns are financed, we must first recognize and accept the fact that money and power go together. Money naturally flows to wherever power is concentrated. Trying to invent ways to block money from flowing from special interest groups and PACs into the hands of politicians is only treating the symptoms of the problem without addressing the fundamental issue. You might as well try to stop the tide. If one accepts the fact that money flows to politicians in proportion to the power they hold, then the solution is obvious. Their power as individuals must be diluted. There are two main ways to dilute the power of an individual politician. First, we can decrease the size of districts so that there are more elected individuals in the governing bodies. Some representatives will still hold more power than others. For example, the chairman of the House Ways and Means committee will hold more power than representatives that are not on the committee at all. But in general, the more votes that are cast on an issue, the harder it becomes to buy enough politicians to ensure the outcome you want. The Founding Fathers of this country understood this concept and this is why they fixed the size of districts when they wrote the Constitution. As originally written, the Constitution called for the number of representatives to increase as the population of the country increased. It wasn't until this century that the Constitution was modified so that the number of representatives is fixed. Thus as the population of the country increases, their power increases. While decreasing the size of districts and increasing the number of elected representatives would be an effective way to dilute the power of individual politicians, most Americans would feel uncomfortable, if not queasy, at the thought of having more politicians running around. But the second way to dilute the power of individual politicians is more palatable, if more difficult to implement. Governing power needs to devolve from the higher levels of government down to the lower ones. It is much more difficult for special interest groups to buy the legislatures of all fifty states than it is to buy key committees in the federal legislative branch of government. It is much more difficult for a PAC to buy out all the county commissions across a state than it is to buy a state legislature. It will be a difficult task to wrest away power from legislators and give it back to the lower levels of government. But it will be easier than trying to stop the flow of money into their pockets. Politicians won't stop being bought until they are no longer worth buying. ==================================== Cultural Phenomena It's The Story, Not The Glitz With the punctuality of a digital clock, last month's release of the Star Wars special edition trilogy was perfectly preceded by a publicity campaign. C3PO himself could not have timed it better. Interviews, TV specials, and sales promotions have permeated pop-culture the past couple of months, all hyping the release of the special edition of Star Wars. But why would anyone care? Why go see this movie again? To hear the publicicists tell it, the reason we need to see Star Wars again is that there is "a whole generation" of people who have never had the pleasure of watching Star Wars on a big theater screen. Fair enough. Just as Disney re-releases its classics for new generations of kids, it would seem reasonable for a movie that has wedged itself deep into our pop culture to be rereleased every now and then. But unlike Disney, the marketing types behind Star Wars haven't spent so much time trying to portray Star Wars as a classic, like it deserves. Instead, they have portrayed the re-release of Star Wars as an _update_ to the original. Previously cut scenes have been added back, the special effects have been enhanced and cleaned up, and the sound track has been totally rerecorded and enhanced. We are teased and tantalized in commercials with glimpses at all the new stuff and this is supposed to be the reason why we'll shell out another six or seven dollars to go see Star Wars yet again. To give credit where credit is due, the special edition release of Star Wars lives up to its special effects promise. The soundtrack is much crisper, there seems to be more variety in the types of sounds the various machinery makes, especially the guns. The big guns make big sounds and the small guns make small sounds. There's much more color in the special effects also. The light saber fight scenes in particular have a richer glow to them. The added scenes, for better or worse, do not contribute to the story in any significant way. There's a bit more elaboration on the empire's pursuit of the two `droids, which seem to have been added for no other reason than to allow the special effects guys to past in some computer generated dinosaur like things that they use as mounted transportation. There's an added scene between Han Solo and Jabba that duplicates almost word for word an earlier scene between Han and one of Jabba's underlings. Again, there's no apparent need for this scene other than the chance it gives the effects guys to show us that yes, in fact, Jabba can move. The one added scene that contributes to the story is a meeting between Luke and his best friend Biggs who joined the Rebellion a year before Luke did. Not only do you get a glimpse of Luke as a real Person instead of a mythic figure, it establishes the fact that Luke is capable of flying a fighter, something that always bothered be about the original. But even with all the polishing up, Star Wars still looks dated by today's standards. And if the techno-wonks behind the scenes wanted to bring Star Wars up to today's standards for special effects, they failed miserably. There's just to much that can't be fixed. Darth Vadar's mask, for example, still looks like it's some sort of discarded car part from a junk yard. The storm troopers still look remarkable stiff and silly. There's still a shot in the cantina scene where you can peer straight through one of the alien's mask. And those 70's era haircuts still look out of place for a galaxy far, far away. In other words, all the add ons are just glitz. Instead of taking the high road, instead of portraying Star Wars as a classic fairy tale born in a new era, instead of portraying Star Wars as a classic to be cherished in its original, the marketers behind Star Wars have added a heavy layer of marketing glitz that the movie simply doesn't need. Even the original characters have undergone extensive makeovers wherever possible. The new movie posters give the Princess more curves than she ever had in the original movies, the New Luke looks more like a lean mean fighting machine than the naive, idealist that the original Luke. And Chewbacca looks like a walking advertisement for a hair products commercial, complete with color highlighting in his well groomed hair. What makes the added glitz even more ironic is that it's the _dirt_ that partly makes Star Wars seem so believable. Watching Star Wars on a TV screen, you lose much of the detail from the big screen. On TV, Star Wars looks like so many other futuristic sci-fi movies where everything is well lit, clean, and utopian. But on the big screen you see all the details and the details you see are dirt. The droids especially stumble through the movie, beat up, scratched, dented, and covered with grit. Han's ship _is_ a piece of junk, and the Rebellion is obviously operating on a shoestring budget, to say the least. All these details add to the feeling that Star Wars is set in desperate times. And it's the sense of desperation that sets the stage for Star Wars, not the special effects. Amid the desperation arises "A New Hope" as the movie's episode title tells us. New hopes rising out of desperate times is a classic theme in all story telling, especially when the New Hope arises from unexpected places and unexpected people. If the team behind Star Wars has forgotten this, the public at least has not. This is why Star Wars will forever be one of the classics in movie making and big effects movies like Independence Day and Twister are doomed to obscurity. Let's face it. Star Wars would not have been the big hit that it was if Luke was just another guy who managed to find his way off a poor, unimportant planet to a more lucrative career in smuggling. Star Wars would have been a dead end movie if Princess Leia had been just another pretty bimbo working her way up the diplomacy food chain by blasting anyone who wouldn't sleep with her. Star Wars wouldn't have deserved a second visit if Han Solo and Chewbacca were just scruffy looking mutineers out to make a quick buck. Star Wars would not be so inspiring if Darth Vadar wasn't so evil. And what's the point of having androids in a movie if they don't also portray some human element? It's too bad that the Star Wars team couldn't have also spent some time polishing up the story. Because where the special effects and techno wizardry where great for its time and could not be improved much for the special edition release, one wishes that the story line of Star Wars could have been beefed up a little, polished here and there. Yes, Star Wars tells a classic fairy tale of good vs. evil. And one of the key reasons Star Wars succeeded is that the Good Guys won in a era of movie making obsessed with blurring the distinction between good and evil and moral ambiguity reigns. But it's kinda thin in the plot department. The term "cardboard character" could have been invented for this movie. How, for example, did Leia get caught up in the Rebellion? Where did she come from? What's her grudge against the Empire? Why exactly is there a civil war in the first place? Unlike most movies of good vs. evil, the evil Empire is actually the revolutionary movement and the Rebellion and the Imperial Senate represent the good and the status quo of the institutions. It's easy enough to hate Darth Vadar since he sounds ominous, dresses in black, and always wears a mask, just like every villain in history. But it would be nice to know a little more specifically just why we are supposed to hate him. And Luke, poor Luke, hero of the whole shooting match, how did you learn the ways of The Force in a mere couple of hours? But no matter, Star Wars can't be changed. It's a thin story, but it's the right story. All the necessary elements, no matter how thinly constructed, are there in the plot to touch the romantic, idealist in all of us. And that's what makes Star Wars worth seeing again after 20 years. Let's hope that George Lucas doesn't forget this in the next trilogy. Stuck In Traffic ==================================== About Stuck In Traffic Stuck In Traffic is a monthly magazine dedicated to evaluating current events, examining cultural phenomena, and sharing true stories. Why "Stuck In Traffic"? Because getting stuck in traffic is good for you. It's an opportunity to think, ponder, and reflect on all things, from the personal to the global. As Robert Pirsig wrote in _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_, "Let's consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn't the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it's exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce...." Submission: Submissions to Stuck In Traffic are always welcome. If you have something on your mind or a personal story you'd like to share, please do. You don't have to be a great writer to be published here, just sincere. Contact Information: All queries, submissions, subscription requests, comments, and hate-mail about Stuck In Traffic should be sent to Calvin Stacy Powers preferably via E-mail (powers@interpath.com) or by mail (2012 Talloway Drive, Cary, NC USA 27511). Copyright Notice: Stuck In Traffic is published and copyrighted by Calvin Stacy Powers who reserves all rights. Individual articles are copyrighted by their respective authors. Unsigned articles are authored by Calvin Stacy Powers. Permission is granted to redistribute and republish Stuck In Traffic for noncommercial purposes as long as it is redistributed as a whole, in its entirety, including this copyright notice. For permission to republish an individual article, contact the author. E-mail Subscriptions: E-mail subscriptions to the ASCII text edition of Stuck In Traffic are free. Send your subscription request to either address listed above. Print Subscriptions: Subscriptions to the printed edition of Stuck In Traffic are available for $10/year. Make checks payable to Calvin Stacy Powers and send to the address listed above. Individual issues are available for $2. Archives: The ASCII text editions of Stuck In Traffic is archived on the internet by etext.org at the following URL: http://www.etext.org/Zines/ASCII/StuckInTraffic/ Trades: If you publish a `zine and would like to trade issues or ad-space, send your zine or ad to either address above. Alliances: Stuck in Traffic supports the Blue Ribbon Campaign for free speech online. See for more information. Stuck In Traffic also supports the Golden Key Campaign for electronic privacy and security. See =================================================================