repubgazette8-17-07earlyvotingelvispersonvlegend

Having Fun

With Mojo

If I get to break a tie, here's what I'll do!

Hey kids! Mojo here! Did you know that if the table games vote ends up in a tie, it could eventually be up to me to decide the outcome? That's right! And that would be a tough one! After all, as everyone knows, table games is not my issue! Oh sure, I signed it into law, and I helped elect all those Democrats who were supported by the gambing industry! But I still didn't have anything to do with it! In fact, you might recall that I insisted that any table games legislation had to provide a lot of money for senior citizens! Why did I do that? Because when you say you're doing something for senior citizens, or for kids, nobody can argue with that! So I try to make everything I do as much about senior citizens and kids as I can! So here's what I would do if I have to break a tie! I'll call a press conference, and I'll surround myself with about a hundred senior citizens, at least half of them in wheelchairs and on walkers! And then I'll say, hey, I don't like table games, but for the sake of the senior citizens, I'm going to break the tie in favor of the "Yes" side! Who could argue with that?

The convenience of early voting is often presented as evidence that early voting is a positive development. Since it is convenient, and people like it and participate in it, it is therefore good, goes the argument.

But early voting -- especially voting that begins so far from the actual election day that the campaign is still in high gear -- has always been illogical, and its flaws are highlighted by the confusion over the uncounted early votes in the Kanawha County table games election.

While more than 10,000 voters participated in early voting in Kanawha County, there is no evidence that the total of 45,000+ votes would have been any less if everyone was forced to wait until Election Day itself.

And in a state like West Virginia, with a history fraught with bought and stolen elections, including ballot tampering issues, any process that allows voted ballots to sit uncounted for days or weeks at a time can hardly be considered an intelligent development.

Early voting made some sense when it was permitted only a few days prior to the actual election. Three days of early voting, for example, is a concept that has some merit, and is considerate of those who might truly have difficulty showing up on the one day set aside for an election. Of course, absentee ballots have always been available for those who know they cannot vote on Election Day.

The current law in West Virginia that requires early votes to be transported back to their respective precincts is especially illogical. But even if all the early votes were kept and counted at the clerk's office, they still sit idle for much too long before they are finally counted, increasing the temptation for those so inclined to misplace or alter certain ballots.

In America today, convenience is valued above all else. But it is more important for democracy to be trusted and ballots regarded as accurate than it is for voting to be so convenient that we can do it whenever the mood happens to strike us.

Early voting should be reexamined, and the calendar for it drastically shortened. Doing so will eliminate most of the problems associated with the table games vote -- problems which will only be magnified when a presidential or gubernatorial race is in the balance.

One theory of sociology holds that a person can never truly advance beyond the social status into which he is born. In other words, if you are born lower class, you remain lower class regardless of how much money you might make in your own life. If you are born middle class, you might gain upper class riches, but your own status remains middle class. Only your children can truly be classified as belonging to a higher class than your own.

Elvis Presley was born January 8, 1935, into poverty about as extreme as it was possible for a white family to fall in post-depression America. He was born to a poor family in a poor town in a poor state -- the Presley family of Tupelo, Mississippi. The Presleys were not well regarded, particulary Vernon, Elvis' father. Vernon was generally thought of as shiftless and lazy, and once spent more than a year in Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary for the crime of altering a four dollar check to make it a forty dollar check.

It wasn't that Vernon was an evil man. He was simply uneducated and unskilled, and never had ten dollars in his pocket at any time. At the age of 18, he married a woman four years his senior, and by 19 he was the father of a young son, a twin actually, whose brother was stillborn. The son was named Elvis, taking Vernon's middle name.

Elvis' mother, Gladys, was a pretty, dark-eyed girl whose physical beauty was no longer in evidence by the time her son achieved worldwide fame and fortune 21 years after his birth. But for Elvis, his mother was his entire world. He recognized at a young age that his father could not bring his mother out of the poverty through which they barely survived, and vowed, often out loud, that he would do so himself someday.

When his father went to prison, Elvis was only age 3, and already he felt the responsibility of taking care of Gladys, developing insomnia for fear of going to sleep and not being awake to defend his mother from whatever dangers might lurk just outside the thin board walls of their two-room shack.

The tragedy of Elvis Presley's life and the cause of his downfall -- a downfall stretched out so long as to be barely noticeable until the very end -- was that a scant two years after he was able to fulfill all his dreams and provide his mother the life of a queen, she died. He never recovered.

He kept his father and other family members -- assorted aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents -- close to him throughout his life, but they served as constant reminders of the one family member whose absence was a neverending source of unbearable sorrow.

As his fame grew and his successes and landmark achievements built one upon the other, he retreated further and further into a world of his own, surrounded only by handpicked, payroll-bound friends, and an increasing dependence on the various pharmaceuticals that allowed his mind to rest, the insomnia to retreat, and the constant memories of his mother to be assuaged.

He married, hoping a wife might fill the void, and when that didn't happen, he hoped a daughter might make him whole again. Instead, his mind turned constantly to how empty his marriage was without Gladys there, and how much she would have loved having a grandchild.

After his divorce, his endless series of girlfriends and one night stands all recounted some variation of the same refrain, how the conversation always turned to his mother, how he would smile and say, "I wish you could have met my mother. You would have loved her."

Shortly before he died, Elvis and his father had one last confrontation, and it was over Gladys. Nearly 20 years after her death, as they lay side by side in a hospital -- Elvis with pneumonia, his dad recovering from a heart attack -- Vernon told Elvis he needed to straighten up and get his life together, adding that it was Elvis' fault Gladys had died when she did. "You worried her into her grave," he told his son. Elvis broke down and cried.

The legacy of Elvis Presley the legend lives on. More records sold than any performer in history. More fans worldwide than any artist, living or dead. More fame, more adulation, and even new achievements being noted three decades after his death.

But the person who died August 16, 1977, alone in his bathroom in his Memphis mansion -- the mansion he bought for his mother and kept throughout his life because he bought it for her and couldn't bear to leave it -- was still the poor boy from Tupelo who had the only dream that mattered to him taken away almost as soon as it was achieved. And that is the Elvis Presley we need to remember sometimes, too.

To Elvis, everything after Gladys' death was a vain attempt to fill the void, and when he finally realized it could not be filled, he began simply to mark time until he could be reunited with her in a better place.

Today, the little family is side by side again in the Meditation Garden at Graceland -- which is known around the world as Elvis' home, but it was really Gladys', and she haunted it all of Elvis' life.