So there we go – it’s ballot time, the moment when you drag yourself off the couch on a Saturday afternoon, dodge the weird neighbor’s kids who are always out the front playing what they reckon is tag but what you think is actually some sort of perverted ‘doctors and nurses’ in full sight of the street; goddamn little exhibitionists, they’ll probably grow up to become nudist vegan truck drivers predisposed to pulling into the Nullabor roadhouse and loudly complaining that they don’t serve anything with fresh tofu while they scratch the peeling tattoos on their scrawny pockmarked arms, a fate worse than compulsory voting on a Saturday afternoon.
You get into your car wondering if in four years time at the next election will the fuckers have outlawed combustion engines so that it’s only electric cars but because the load on the power grid is so huge only approved citizens may apply for the right to have an electric car and you only get that if someone in your family blew someone who knows someone in the ACTU. Socialism, my friends, socialism. We’re driving down to the voting booth to vote on socialism. The choice that you have is do you immediately get the socialism good and hard or do you get it over time on a long slow burn.
If we live in a democratic country then why is voting compulsory? Doesn’t sound very democratic to me.
Down to the voting booth you go where you’ll be greeted by the permanently placarded. You walk past the gauntlet of evil leprechauns who yell and scream while they attempt to thrust their voting pamphlets into your hand. Take every single one on offer, take two or three of them from each individual from every imaginary party and then when you get to the end of the line cry out in pain and throw your arms up high into the air while you sink to your knees, Platoon style, and as you slowly expire from the imaginary bullet the voting pamphlets will settle around you and drift to the ground in a mound of voting confetti as they bury your prostrate form in an improvised paper grave.
Hold that for a bit and then get up and walk in to vote as if nothing happened. Maybe it was all a dream. I’ve seen things that you people wouldn’t believe, you know the guff. Make sure that you blink a lot. Rapid blinking freaks people out. It looks like you’re trying to make up your mind whether or not to go full postal on them, and the great thing is that the rapid blinking actually puts you in that frame of mind. It’s what the sergeants should have said to the troops before they went over the top on a mad walk into machine gun fire – “Make sure you blink, you bastards!” No troops can handle that amount of blinking coming at them over such a concentrated period. Whites of the eyes my ass; when you want to get things done you gotta blink your way to victory.
Cross my name off the list, you fat fucking cow. Hand me my ballot so I can take it into that little booth and vote for the most left wing socialist prick that I can find. I want the end to come good and hard and fast and now. No more pussy footing around. We’ve had it far too good for far too long in this here lucky country of ours. It’s time for some pain and suffering and then maybe we’ll be able to crawl our way out of this goddamn mess that we’re in. Who’s the biggest lefty on here? Ask the question with a loud voice from inside the voting booth. Ask the line of people behind you who are all wishing that they never had to get off their own respective couches and come down here to participate in the great democracies. Give me a socialist lefty to vote for, someone really stupid but I repeat myself. Maybe the prospective politicians will actually be at the voting booth when you arrive. Wouldn’t that be a dream? Why excuse me little 21 year old Greens candidate with a face like someone who looks like they had plastic surgery in the womb. Are you going to fuck our country good and hard? Convince me ’cause I’m only going to vote for you if you can guarantee me that you’ll ensure that your goons will come banging on my door at five in the morning to haul me and my family off to some camp in the middle of the desert for reeducation.
Some shelia comes up to me and in a loud voice designed to silence cockatoos at a thousand paces she begins a tirade of sorts which leads me to believe that she might not approve of my life choices. I don’t understand her problem. After all, I am finally getting down with the socialism that she so desperately wants. I offer her a pacific way out of the situation by declaring that I can’t stick my cock in any of her university degrees. The Green party candidate promptly declares himself to be a homosexual but I tell him that that ship has sailed and the new homosexual is actually right wing misogynist, and I got that one locked down good and hard, motherfucker.
When you walk over to put your ballot in the box you have to saunter. You have to walk in a way that declares that whatever you marked on that ballot is goddamn amazing and anybody in their right mind would be crazy not to do the same thing as you. Which means that you should share. So walk back to the line of poor schmucks waiting to vote and show them all what you voted for. Walk right down the line with your ballot held proudly open for everyone to see and admire. Now there is a man who knows how to vote. I haven’t seen voting like that for almost a hundred years, my son. Takes me back to the good times it does, yes sirree. If only more men knew how to vote like that then there might be some hope for this miserable country.
You got two options, boys – socialism lite or socialism hard. Take your medicine like a man.
This article was originally published at https://pushingrubberdownhill.com/, where Adam Piggott publishes regularly and brilliantly. You can purchase Adam’s books here.