The Rent is Too Damn High and Other Third Party Fun

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, there was an immediate move to capitlism and democratization. If you read any normalized history or political book about the period of change, you read it as a collective move of the populations towards democracy, but that’s not really what happened. What really happened was it was a move towards capitalism. Democracy was just one of those buy one get one free things that came with capitalism. During the Cold War, people were interested in the things capitalism could bring, like food and shelves filled with products. They thought democracy had to be part of the deal, so they accepted it freely. It was only after they realized what democracy actually was that a lot of these newly “free” countries started moving back towards authoritarianism. The interesting part is that they still wanted capitalism; democracy just wasn’t all that important.

It is probably important to point out that one of the first things that came from this new formed freedom of democracy was a new sense of political parties. It might surprise you that one of the most popular political parties to arise was the Beer Party. Its platform was simple: “Vote for us and you get lots of beer.” They actually got a lot more seats than almost every other non-main political party. In the Czech Republic, they were so powerful they actually shared power in the coalition government.

Why am I talking about this? Well, in the United States, we don’t really have third parties that have any power or significance, but we do have third parties. Most of the time they’re marginalized and looked over as a joke, like the Green Party or the Communist Party, but in some cases they actually gain a bit of standing, like the Reform Party. And then they become marginalized like the rest of them and no longer stand for anything.

Yet, every now and then one of those parties comes along that has a leader who is so outrageous that he or she essentially becomes bigger than the party. This was discovered at the recent debate for the governorship of New York, when the debate was practically won by Jimmy McMillan, who is the governor nominee from a party called, wait for it…The Rent is Too Damn High Party. And as expected, Jimmy made every attempt to utter that phrase during his one opportunity to speak to the masses during the debate.

The strange thing is that he came off as the most interesting and most popular of the speakers during the debate mainly because he came off as being completely nuts. Will that translate to votes? Probably not, but it sure would be interesting if it did.

Which brings to mind a situation that happened when I was in California. There was an interesting individual who was running for president during the 2008 election. He was this guy that used to hang out at Carls Jr every morning, and by coincidence so did I. I had this theory that crazy people used to hang out at Carls Jr every morning and…um, I mean crazy people AND I used to hang out there. Anyway, so during the Obama election, I was minding my own business and this guy comes over to my table and says: “Aren’t you a political science professor?”

Now, other than the fact that I used to walk around with my graduate graduation attire on every day after I graduated, I have no idea how he figured that out, but I said yes, I was. So, he started to tell me about how he’s been running for president for the last 20 years, and the media never pays any attention to him.

Then he proceeded to pull out a briefcase with all of his papers. Okay, it wasn’t really a briefcase. It was a Manila envelope that was tattered with paper hanging out all over the place, but he called it his briefcase, so I’m sticking to that. He then began to show me, in no uncertain terms (well, uncertain if you’re certifiably nuts) the linkage between the Kennedy election, 911, and something called the Koala Bear Effect. I listened to him for about an hour, before I realized I was slowly beginning to understand and believe him, so I bid him fairwell and then ran home, screaming.

I wrote an article about this for the local newspaper, and then immediately started receiving inquiries from larger newspaper reporters, wanting to know how I was able to find this guy, as they’ve been looking to interview him for years now but never could. I said that he eats at Carls Jr every morning, and they didn’t believe me. Eventually, the calls stopped coming. I realized then and there that some reporters are extremely lazy when it comes to following up on a lead.

The point is: There are third parties out there that have some very interesting people running for office. And yes, there are nutcases out there, too. But as long as we keep focusing only on the main runners, we’re never going to change the system or even have new ideas. Unfortunately, there’s no one out there even trying to make a difference.

So, until the next election, all I can say is that yes, the damn rent is too high. Unfortunately, no one is planning to do anything about it.