My dear, it’s all right.  Go ahead, talk politics.  
I guess you got a shock when Brenda told you 
how she’s going to vote and then—tell me if
I’m wrong—she started to proselytize. 
No, no need to apologize.  Politics 
is mostly talk, but that’s not to say the 
talk’s inconsequential.  In fact, I think 
people don’t do it enough—I mean to
each other, I mean informed conversations, 
without the slogan-cudgels and 
sawed-off bumper stickers.  
				So, you 
mentioned democracy and Brenda scoffed?  
Well, democracy may not be as fragile as 
Brenda is cynical.  You know those tires 
that seal themselves around six-inch nails? 
Democracy’s self-correcting too; you 
can make a change without killing anybody.  
The Athenians kept it going for 
a while.  You could vote on everything so
long as you weren’t female or a slave. 
What, my dear?  Females and slaves. It’s what
you mean by the word with all those syllables.
What was it?  Oh yes, intersectionality.
Anyway, Athens’ sort of voting’s risky, 
short-term thinking, passing passions. Since 
Socrates, no philosopher’s had a 
good word for direct democracy, 
not even Rousseau.  Plato hated it
all, and dreamed of a city ruled by  
unelected geometers. One size 
fits all.  Aristotle, born middle-aged
and a biologist, knew better.  Knew what?
That no good society is perfect, dear,
and no perfect society is good.
Ah, you like that uninspiring one-liner?
Good.  Up next?  The pre-imperial Romans.
Once they’d packed Tarquin off, they ruled themselves
decently for centuries with a constitution 
durable as one of their arches:
One senate, two parties, and a brace of
consuls, even tribunes for the legions,
traders, and unlettered hoi polloi.  
Aristocratic and authoritarian? Sure,
and patriarchal too—but there was
no tyranny.  It worked until they started 
conquering like addicts, amassing their empire, 
which led to Julius then a whole slew of 
Caesars. 
	     People are sure they’re free and that 
their forebears weren’t.  To historians 
history always looks inevitable.  
Demosthenes could have told them that empires 
cry out for emperors.  Can you picture 
our City Council trying to run half 
of Europe?  Still, it’s touching how Romans
kept up the republican fiction for years, 
as if to admit the truth would shame them, 
as if their stern ancestors would rise up 
and point.  
	     So, democracy, you said.  
I can hear Brenda’s dismissive little 
pfft.  It’s thanks to her our democracy 
really does feel fragile.  Franklin warned us 
on Day One.  There are always Brendas
to tell us we’re not perfect, or even good.  
Those traditions and institutions we liked 
to think were stable as a pyramid 
are wobbling, attacked, violated, called 
shams or worse.  Courts, public education, 
regular elections, and a free press.  
						I’m worried 
and you are too, my dear, or Brenda 
wouldn’t have gotten to you, made you 
anxious that liberty and the rule of law 
are dry and dead, like hollow reeds waiting 
to be cut down.  
		    Ironic it should be
conservatives behind it, the new kind 
I mean, who don’t aim to conserve anything.  
A few years back, one of the old sort prophesied 
that, if his zealous colleagues couldn’t win 
democratically, it’s democracy 
they’d give up on, not their views.  No, they’d hug 
them all the tighter to their heaving chests 
and withered dugs.  Sound at all like Brenda?
I’m thinking of my own pal, Mrs. Debeque.  
Sweet woman.  Last week we also got to 
talking politics.  Ruth likes the Constitution 
and all the amendments but said her favorite’s 
the nineteenth because she loves voting, the
lining up, the democratic queue 
of accountants, secretaries, waitresses, 
seamstresses, porters.  She doesn’t hold with 
voting by mail.  She says it isn’t 
democratic enough because you don’t 
see and smell your fellow citizens.  I 
asked how she chooses a candidate.  
“Oh, that’s easy,” said Ruth.  “I just ask Charlie 
who he’s for then vote for somebody else.”