Author Jeff Greenfield has attempted the difficult, a political tract disguised as a novel … or perhaps he intended “The People’s Choice” as a novel with a political message.
As a novel, “The People’s Choice” is excellent. It is funny, it has characters that are full-fleshed, including some who are admirable.
In fact, one of his characters surprises us by being so completely honorable, a characteristic not often found in novels (or politics) of today.
Mr. Greenfield is not an author from whom I would have expected humor, but perhaps I was just uninformed. His dedication reads, “To my father, Ben Greenfield, who taught me to love baseball, the Marx Brothers, punctuality, W. C. Fields, and who was always, always there.”
In “The People’s Choice,” Mr. Greenfield demonstrates great cynicism about politicians and about people in the “news” business, and I expect most of us can accept and agree with that.
He also demonstrates great knowledge: “It is impossible to be counted as a sophisticated observer of American culture unless you enthusiastically embrace the idea that our mass media define reality. As Bishop Berkeley might ask today: If a tree falls in the forest and it did not make the six o’clock news, did it make a sound? Did it, in fact, fall at all?”
Now how often does a novelist, how often does anybody bring Bishop Berkeley into the conversation?
(Bishop Berkeley’s philosophical antithesis was David Hume. Of the two of them it was written “No matter. Never mind.”
The point of his political tract is to convince us to eliminate the Electoral College. As a novel, “The People’s Choice” is excellent, a joy to read; as a political tract, it is a failure.
It fails on several fronts, philosophical, historical, and psychological.
Mr. Greenfield made a major effort to bring history to bear on his position, but though he gets most of his facts right, he misses the truth, he misses, or ignores, the reason the Electoral College was created, and he misses, or ignores, the fact that these United States were joined in a federal union of sovereign states.
His psychological flaw was illustrated, was spelled out, in another novel, Glenn Beck’s “The Overton Window.” One of Mr. Beck’s bad guys said it perfectly: “… Societies need government. Governments elevate men into power, and men who seek power are prone to corruption. It spreads like a disease, then, corruption on corruption, and sooner or later the end result is always a slide into tyranny. That’s the way it’s always been. And so this government of the United States was brilliantly designed to keep that weakness of human nature in check, but it required the people to participate daily, to be vigilant, and they have not. …”
In fact, presidential elections are often decided by about 25 percent of the people who could have voted.
Of course, there are several reasons, including that election laws and “news” media discriminate so blatantly, against parties that aren’t Democrat or Republican, against candidates who don’t start out with lots of money.
Those reasons are only hinted at in “The People’s Choice” and in the “news” media and the schools, so we are again made grateful for the new media, including the Internet.
“The People’s Choice” was published by the Penguin Group, 1996.
Highly recommended. ( )